Modern Asian Studies Volume 45 Part 1 January 2011

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TAYLOR C. S HERMAN , W ILLIAM G OULD AND S ARAH A NSARI : From Subjects to Citizens: Society and the Everyday State in India and Pakistan, 1947–1970 E LEANOR N EWBIGIN : Personal Law and Citizenship in India’s Transition to Independence W ILLIAM G OULD : From Subjects to Citizens? Rationing, refugees and the publicity of corruption over Independence in UP YASMIN K HAN : Performing Peace: Gandhi’s assassination as a critical moment in the consolidation of the Nehruvian state TAYLOR C. S HERMAN : Migration, Citizenship and Belonging in Hyderabad (Deccan), 1946–1956 I AN TALBOT: Punjabi Refugees’ Rehabilitation and the Indian State: Discourses, Denials and Dissonances M ARKUS D AECHSEL : Sovereignty, Governmentality and Development in Ayub’s Pakistan: the Case of Korangi Township S ARAH A NSARI : Everyday expectations of the state during Pakistan’s early years: Letters to the Editor, Dawn (Karachi), 1950–1953 D ANIEL H AINES : Concrete ‘progress’: irrigation, development and modernity in mid-twentieth century Sind C ATHERINE C OOMBS : Partition Narratives: Displaced trauma and culpability among British civil servants in 1940s Punjab

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Modern Asian Studies

Modern Asian Studies

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Cambridge Journals Online For further information about this journal please go to the journal website at:

journals.cambridge.org/ass

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VOLUME 45

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JANUARY 2011 ISSN 0026-749X

From Subjects to Citizens: Society and the Everyday State in India and Pakistan, 1947–1970 Guest Editors Taylor C. Sherman, William Gould and Sarah Ansari

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notes to contributors

editor: Joya Chatterji, University of Cambridge book review editor: Norbert Peabody, University of Cambridge execu tive commit tee Seema Alavi, University of Delhi Timothy Harper, University of Cambridge Caroline Humphrey, University of Cambridge

Charles Schencking, University of Hong Kong Hans Van de Ven, University of Cambridge David Washbrook, University of Cambridge

editorial board Shahid Amin, University of Delhi Sunil Amrith, University of London Christopher Bayly, University of Cambridge Sumantra Bose, The London School of Economics & Political Science Prasenjit Duara, National University of Singapore Wang Gungwu, National University of Singapore Farhat Hasan, University of Delhi Engseng Ho, Duke University Isabel Hofmeyr, University of Witwatersrand Indivar Kamtekar, Jawaharlal Nehru University Sunil Khilnani, The Johns Hopkins University Victor T. King, University of Leeds

Victor Lieberman, University of Michigan Claude Markovits, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris Magnus Marsden, University of London Rana Mitter, University of Oxford Tirthankar Roy, University of London James Scott, Yale University Samita Sen, Jadavpur University Ornit Shani, University of Haifa Eric Tagliacozzo, Cornell University Robert Travers, Cornell University C. J. W.-L. Wee, Nanyang Technological University Thongchai Winichakul, University of Wisconsin-Madison Tan Tai Yong, National University of Singapore Yangwen Zheng, University of Manchester

emeritus editor Gordon Johnson, University of Cambridge Modern Asian Studies (issn 0026‒749x) is published six times a year by Cambridge University Press, The Edinburgh Building, Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge cb2 8ru, and 32 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10013–2473. The subscription (excluding VAT but including delivery by air where appropriate), plus electronic access to institutional subscribers, to volume 45, 2011 is £322 net (US $574 in the USA, Canada and Mexico) for institutions. Individuals who order direct from the publishers and certify that the journal is for their personal use may subscribe at a reduced rate of £65 (US $110 in the USA, Canada and Mexico). Single parts cost £56 (US $99 in the USA, Canada and Mexico). The electronic only price available to institutional subscribers is £288 ($510 in USA, Canada and Mexico). All orders must be accompanied by payment. EU subscribers (outside the UK) who are not registered for VAT should add VAT at their country’s rate. VAT registered subscribers should provide their VAT registration number. Japanese prices for institutions are available from Kinokuniya Company Ltd, P.O. Box 55, Chitose, Tokyo 156, Japan. Periodicals postage paid at New York, NY and additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: send address changes in USA, Canada and Mexico to MODERN ASIAN STUDIES, Cambridge University Press, 100 Brook Hill Drive, West Nyack, New York 10994‒2133. Information on Modern Asian Studies and all other Cambridge journals can be accessed via www.journals.cambridge.org This journal issue has been printed on FSC-certified paper and cover board. FSC is an independent, non-governmental, not-for-profit organization established to promote the responsible management of the world’s forests. Please see www.fsc.org for information. © Cambridge University Press 2011 Printed in the United Kingdom by the University Press, Cambridge

Modern Asian Studies Modern Asian Studies promotes original, innovative and rigorous research on the history, sociology, anthropology and economics of modern Asia. Covering South Asia, South-East Asia, China, Japan and Korea, the journal is published in six parts each year. It welcomes articles which deploy inter-disciplinary and comparative research methods. Modern Asian Studies specialises in the publication of longer monographic essays based on path-breaking new research; it also carries substantial synoptic essays which illuminate the state of the broad field in fresh ways. Issues of the journal will occasionally contain a forum of articles on related themes. Responses to issues raised in the fora are welcomed by the Editor and will be subject to the usual review procedure. It contains a book review section which offers detailed analysis of important new publications in the field. Substantial review articles will be commissioned to discuss important new books. The Editor also welcomes proposals for such reviews. Unsolicited review articles will be accepted on the basis of peer review. Submissions Submission of an article will be taken to imply that it has not been previously published and that it is not on offer to any other publisher. Authors of articles published in the journal assign copyright to Cambridge University Press (with certain rights reserved) and will receive a copyright assignment form for signature on acceptance of their paper. Authors are responsible for obtaining permission to reproduce any material in which they do not own copyright, to be used in both print and electronic media, and for ensuring that the appropriate acknowledgements are included in their manuscript. The Editor welcomes expression of all shades of opinion, but responsibility for them rests with their author. The Editorial Board regrets that it is not able to relay reports for articles not accepted for publication. All correspondence should be addressed to: Dr Joya Chatterji at [email protected] Text and Manuscript Preparation All articles (text and footnotes) must be clearly typed in single spacing throughout, including footnotes. Submissions must be submitted as an email attachment in Word. The use of diacritical marks, italics and capital letters should be kept to a minimum. All sources or references should be incorporated as footnotes, cited in full in the first instance, within the body of the text. References repeated in the footnotes should be by author and short title. Spelling, dates, references and footnote numbers should be checked for accuracy. The title of the article, the author's name, affiliation, full postal address and corresponding email address, should be typed at the beginning of the article. An abstract of between 100 and 250 words summarising the contents of the article should be typed before the main text. Sub headings must be used for long articles. Do not use Roman Numerals to divide papers into sections. Tables should be clearly laid out and numbered consecutively. Vertical lines between columns should be omitted. All figures and totals should be checked for accuracy. Figures should be supplied final size as electronic files in either TIFF or EPS format, scanned at a minimum of 320dpi for black and white halftone, or colour artwork, at 1200 dpi for black and white line art, and at 800 dpi for combination artwork (line/halftone). They should be clearly numbered with an accompanying figure legend. Each figure should be cited at least once in the text. The spelling of place names should be consistent with that used in the text. When an article has been accepted for publication, the author must submit an electronic copy and should ensure that the final manuscript includes the following: • Full title and short title of no more than 40 characters, including spaces (for running header) • Author name, affiliation, full postal address and email address • Abstract of 100‒200 words • Sub section headings • All figures and tables (with captions and consecutively numbered) Proofs Authors should note that no substantive alterations or additions can be made to first proofs, so should ensure that their Word Document is thoroughly checked for accuracy before final submission. First proofs in electronic PDF format only will be sent to the author who will be asked to send a clear list of corrections by email, quoting the appropriate line numbers, or to mark the corrections on a printed version and return this to the Editor within fourteen days. Offprints Each author will receive a PDF file of his or her published article and a copy of the journal issue in which it appears.

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C Cambridge University Press 2010 Modern Asian Studies 45, 1 (2011) pp. 1–6.  doi:10.1017/S0026749X10000235 First published online 3 November 2010

From Subjects to Citizens: Society and the Everyday State in India and Pakistan, 1947–1970∗ TAYLOR C. SHERM AN Department of International History, London School of Economics, London WC2A 2AE, UK Email: [email protected] WILLIAM GOULD School of History, University of Leeds, Leeds, LS2 9JT, UK Email: [email protected] SARAH ANSARI Department of History, Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham, TW20 0PX, UK Email: [email protected]

Introduction This special issue of Modern Asian Studies explores the shift from colonial rule to independence in India and Pakistan, with the aim of unravelling the explicit meanings and relevance of ‘independence’ for the new citizens of India and Pakistan during the two decades after 1947. While the study of postcolonial South Asia has blossomed in recent years, this volume addresses a number of imbalances in this ∗ The papers in this volume were originally presented at a workshop, held on 4 September 2008, as part of a project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) entitled, From Subjects to Citizens: Society and the Everyday State in India and Pakistan. The editors would like to thank the participants at that seminar for their lively discussion of these papers, and the AHRC for its generous support for this project.

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dynamic and highly popular field. Firstly, the histories of India and Pakistan after 1947 have come to be conceived separately, with many scholars assuming that the two states developed along divergent paths after independence. Thus, the dominant historical paradigm has been to examine either India or Pakistan in relative isolation from one another. While a handful of very recent books on the partition of the subcontinent have begun to study the two states simultaneously,1 very few of these new histories reach beyond the immediate concerns of partition.2 Of course, both countries developed out of much the same set of historical experiences. Viewing the two states in the same frame not only allows the contributors to this issue to explore common themes, it also facilitates an exploration of the powerful continuities between the pre- and post-independence periods. Secondly, the papers that follow pose new questions about the nature of the state in early postcolonial South Asia. A small number of recent historical works concerning India and Pakistan in the immediate aftermath of independence have begun to bridge the gap between the study of ‘high’ and ‘low’ politics in South Asia by examining low-level state programmes such as refugee rehabilitation and the recovery of abducted women.3 However, there has been very little historical work on the development of popular, public cultures surrounding the state in South Asia at this time. This special issue seeks to fill this gap by drawing on recent anthropological work on the ‘everyday state’.4 Thus, whilst remaining sensitive to the ambiguity and complexity of the boundaries between state and society, many of its papers focus on the functioning of the state in everyday life where it was actually experienced by ordinary people, with contributors exploring the interplay between the rhetorical, ideological platforms set out in New Delhi and Karachi and the interpretations of these agendas in 1 Tan Tai Yong and Gyanesh Kudaisya, The Aftermath of Partition in South Asia (London: Routledge, 2000); Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar, The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia: Refugees, Boundaries, Histories (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). 2 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Rochona Majumdar, and Andrew Sartori, (eds), From the Colonial to the Postcolonial: India and Pakistan in Transition (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2007). 3 For example, Zamindar, The Long Partition, Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin, Borders and Boundaries: Women in India’s Partition (Delhi: Kali for Women, 1998). 4 C. J. Fuller, and Veronique Benei, (eds), The Everyday State and Society in Modern India (New Delhi: Social Science Press, 2000); Thomas Blom Hansen, and Finn Stepputat, (eds), States of Imagination: Ethnographic Explorations of the Postcolonial State (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001).

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different localities. This framework significantly augments current understanding of postcolonial South Asia, without replicating the longstanding divide between histories of ‘high’ and ‘low’ politics in South Asia. This volume diverges from the existing historiographical discussions about the nature of the transition from the colonial to the postcolonial. Over the past decade, scholarship on the subject has become ensnared in a debate about whether or not 1947 marked a distinct break in the history of the subcontinent. The process of transition, however, was far too complex to be encapsulated in the dichotomy change/no change. As the papers here demonstrate, partition and the integration of the princely states often had a profound effect on the everyday lives of many of the new citizens of India and Pakistan. Moreover these events not only altered the geographical extent of the states of South Asia, but also expanded the states’ responsibilities and opened up opportunities for governments to pursue policies distinct from those of their colonial predecessors. At the same time, however, the papers indicate that, whilst the state in South Asia was subject to considerable adjustment in the transition to independence, the rhetorical underpinnings of the postcolonial states were often not so novel and, in many cases, the state’s modus operandi did not change during this period. Thus, discourses originating in development regimes, or the nationalist movements of the first half of the twentieth century, shaped not only the policies of independent governments, but also the demands that postcolonial citizens made of them. In addition, the rationing, requisition and recruitment policies introduced during the Second World War stretched state bureaucracies to their widest extent to date, and, simultaneously, revealed new weaknesses and opened up new opportunities for corruption that stretched into the postcolonial period. Until very recently it was also common to view the decades between 1947 and the present (2010) as a single period in the history of South Asia. Whilst lines of periodization are always perilous to draw, today’s most cutting-edge scholarship suggests that it does make some sense to regard the interval between the 1930s and the 1960s as a distinct stage in South Asian history. By the third decade after independence, the major tensions extant in the nation-building projects of both India and Pakistan could no longer be contained. As these tensions erupted, they began to disrupt the ordinary functioning of politics and to tear apart existing social bonds. This is not to suggest, however, that the time before 1970 was a golden age: quite the contrary. The propensity to study the first two decades of postcolonial rule

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alongside more recent decades has tended to overstate the coherence and stability of the former, especially with respect to India. India’s much-discussed ‘crisis of secularism’5 in the 1990s elicited many rose-tinted evaluations of the Nehruvian state’s secular credentials, but the contributions below by Gould, Newbigin, and Sherman highlight the extent to which this nostalgic view misjudges the early years of independence in India. Indeed, looking at this earlier era from a historical perspective, it becomes clear that the nature of the state and the content of citizenship were keenly contested at this time. It is in these contests, therefore, that one finds a distinct set of issues and themes that characterize this period. Amongst these issues, the significance of the performative aspect of state power on the subcontinent is stressed in many of the papers in this volume. Recently researchers have come to highlight the ways in which both colonial and early postcolonial rule were characterized by infrequent but spectacular displays of state power. From the use of exemplary force to maintain ‘law and order’ in the districts, to the drafting of grand schemes designed to awe or inspire the population, certain projects or actions of the state were imbued with extraordinary meaning and designed to send a message to the population at large. Both postcolonial India and Pakistan used ceremony to underscore the legitimacy of the state and to chart a vision of the nation after independence. Khan shows that Gandhi’s death rituals, including the distribution of his ashes to disparate locations in India, provided a medium through which the Congress party could try to unite a nation that had been deeply fractured by the experience of partition. In postcolonial Pakistan, as Haines and Daechsel demonstrate, large-scale development projects were often used to assert (frequently with an eye to impressing international audiences) the capacity of the state to shape not only the land and the built environment, but to discipline the people inhabiting these spaces. That these projects were essentially spectacular in nature was evident in governments’ frequent disregard for the practical consequences of such schemes for the population, and the subsequent failure of some of the most prominent of them. Coombs’ work also emphasizes the performative aspect of power as she traces the ways in which the disproportionate influence which British ICS officers often had over events in their districts dissipated when it became clear that the 5 See Anuradha Dingwaney Needham and Rajeshwary Sundar Rajan (eds), The Crisis of Secularism in India (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2007).

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British were leaving the subcontinent. Without the assurance that such displays of limited but spectacular power would be backed by the kind of favours that only the state could provide, the acts of British officers were unable to stem the violence of partition. This contributed to the popular sense that the state ‘disintegrated’ during partition. Indeed, the state has often been ‘written out’ of personal narratives of partition, whether from ICS men or from Punjabi refugees, as shown by both Coombs and Talbot. Partition’s effect on the state and the extraordinary pressures that the violent displacement of people put upon state resources is the second prominent theme in this period. The state had an ambiguous place in the years straddling partition: on the one hand, the struggles of partition coupled with the promises made by nationalist leaders raised expectations to unprecedented heights. Vulnerable refugees were often extremely reliant upon the state, and rehabilitation plans often brought populations that had had no previous contact with the state into its orbit. On the other hand, as Ansari’s work reveals, the early postcolonial period was no golden age for many citizens: their keen expectations that everyday life would improve dramatically after independence often met with bitter disappointment. Members of the population frequently voiced their resentment at the failures of their new government servants to live up to the expectation that citizens be given fair access to goods and services. Indeed, as Gould makes clear, access to services was often secured through kinship networks rather than through the functioning of impartial bureaucratic procedures. And the inadequacies of the state from poor planning to deficient implementation opened up opportunities for corruption to flourish. Indeed, as Ansari, Talbot and Gould note, citizens’ often lofty expectations were regularly coupled with a remarkable willingness on the part of individuals to use their own guile to manipulate those services which the state did provide to secure personal advantage. Indeed, the weakness of the postcolonial state in both India and Pakistan emerges as a surprising, but recurrent theme in this period. Of course, it is common to lament the ineptitude of the early Pakistani state, especially in comparison with that of India. But these papers reveal that the Indian state, whilst undoubtedly endowed with more resources than Pakistan, was often internally incoherent and its officers seem to have been perpetually subject to undue influence. Furthermore, as Gould and Sherman underline, it was often individual state actors who did most to circumvent state structures for their own ends. This fact, which helps explain the gulf

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between official rhetoric and the everyday experience of the state, suggests that historians ought to do more to problematize the very nature of the state during this period. Finally, these papers demonstrate that conceptions of citizenship were far from settled in this period, even in India where the constitution was drafted and enacted relatively quickly. Although citizenship was defined using the language of abstract rights, the situation was invariably far more complex than this. As they emerged out of partition, the religious identities of individuals assumed extraordinary importance in the new states of South Asia, not least for the displaced, whose access to privileges often was tied to the way in which the state identified them. Whilst partition was important, the ways in which ideas of citizenship were inscribed with religious and gender norms often had their origins in the colonial period. The fundamental rights written into the Indian constitution, according to Newbigin, were demarcated within colonial legal structures which ensured that these legal conceptions of citizenship were mediated by religious and gender norms. As a result, the rights contained in the Indian constitution were often most compatible with the interests of Hindu men. Citizenship was not only shaped at the constitutional level, quotidian conceptions of belonging were equally important. Local level understandings of who was worthy of citizenship were often coloured by the intense social polarisation which accompanied the partition of the subcontinent. In partition’s long wake, the loyalty of Muslims in India remained suspect long after the violence had subsided. According to Gould’s research, an individual’s Muslim identity could add force to allegations of corruption. Likewise, Sherman reveals the ways in which Muslims of non-Indian origin residing in Hyderabad (Deccan) were rendered suspect in the aftermath of the invasion of Hyderabad in 1948: many were deported or encouraged to leave not because their legal rights had changed, but because informal notions of belonging would have them excluded from India after 1947. Clearly, the first two decades following independence witnessed an intense contest over the meaning and responsibilities of citizenship, and over the purpose and scope of the postcolonial state. By viewing India and Pakistan in the same frame, and examining the state in its interactions with the population at the everyday level, this special issue offers a fresh look at the field of early postcolonial history.

C Cambridge University Press 2010 Modern Asian Studies 45, 1 (2011) pp. 7–32.  doi:10.1017/S0026749X10000338

Personal Law and Citizenship in India’s Transition to Independence ELEANOR NEWBIGIN School of Oriental and African Studies, Thornhaugh Street, London WC1H 0XG, UK Email: [email protected]

Abstract Studies of the post-colonial state have often presented it as a structure that has fallen under the control of self-interested sections of the Indian elite. In terms of citizenship, the failure of the state to do more to realize the egalitarian promise of the Fundamental Rights, set out in the Constitution of 1950, has often been attributed to interference by these powerful elite. Tracing the interplay between debates about Hindu property rights and popular support or tolerance for the notion of individual, liberal citizenship, this paper argues that the principles espoused in the Fundamental Rights were never neutral abstractions but, long before independence, were firmly embedded in the material world of late-colonial political relations. Thus, in certain key regards, the citizen-subject of the Indian Constitution was not the individual, freed from ascriptive categories of gender or religious identity, but firmly tied to the power structures of the community governed by Hindu law.

Introduction The inclusion of a list of Fundamental Rights in the Constitution of 1950 seemed to make real a long standing Congress promise: that independence from British rule would bring about a dramatic change in the lives of ordinary Indians. Modelling itself on documents such as the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the American Bill of Rights, the Indian Fundamental Rights set out a vision of the individual citizen-subject, unfettered by notions of gender, religion or caste. The Rights have been seen to mark a profound difference between the nation-state and its colonial predecessor.1 Underpinning the colonial administration and legal system was an understanding 1 Granville Austin, The Indian Constitution: Cornerstone of a Nation (Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 1999 edn, 1966), pp. 50–61.

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of Indian society as comprising not autonomous individuals but social collectives, defined by caste, gender and religious identity.2 Indians’ relationship with the colonial state was, in the main, mediated through this group identity—access to political office or the law was shaped by a subject’s sex and the religious or caste community to which he or she belonged. The passage of the Fundamental Rights suggested a radical reform of this state-society relationship; whereas colonial subjecthood was premised on difference and indirect contact with the state, citizenship suggested a direct relationship between the state and each and every individual Indian. Six decades after independence, it is clear that many Indians do not enjoy the citizenship rights set out in the constitution. Indians’ access to state influence and resources remains very much mediated by gender, class and religion. In trying to explain the post-colonial state’s failure to secure social equality, academics have often focused on the way in which the state applied citizenship and governance after independence, helping to reinforce a sense that 15 August, 1947 marks a clear watershed in the Indian populace’s relationship with the state. There has been little consideration of the historical evolution of Indian citizenship or of how this might have informed the development of a state-citizen nexus after independence.3 Rather, political and social inequality in contemporary India has been attributed to the dominance of self-interested sections of the Indian elite, who have captured state structures and resources.4 Supporting a notion that the current Indian state is in ‘crisis’, this argument implies that, were it not for this elite domination, the Indian state would be able to secure the equal citizenship written into its constitution in the abstract. The idea of the current crisis of the Indian state rests on the assumption that there exists a ‘correct’ model of state power and/or 2 D. A. Washbrook, ‘Law, State and Agrarian Society in Colonial India’, Modern Asian Studies, vol. 15, no. 3, (1981), pp. 653–658; Rosalind O’Hanlon, ‘Issues of Widowhood: Gender and Resistance in Colonial Western India’ in Douglas Haynes and Gyan Prakash (eds), Contesting Power: Resistance and Everyday Social Relations in South Asia (Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 1991), pp. 62–108, especially pp. 77–79. 3 Recent exceptions are Mrinalini Sinha, Specters of Mother India: the Global Restructuring of an Empire (Duke, Durham & London, 2006); and Rajnarayan Chandavarkar ‘Customs of Governance: Colonialism and Democracy in Twentieth Century India’, Modern Asian Studies, vol. 41, no. 3 (2007), pp. 441–470. 4 Pranap Bardhan, The Political Economy of Development in India (Blackwell, Oxford, 1984); Achin Vanaik, India’s Painful Transition: Bourgeois Democracy in India (Verso, London, 1990); Atul Kohli, Democracy and Discontent: India’s Growing Crisis of Governability (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1991).

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citizenship rights that India should follow. Indeed, studies of postcolonial India have often been framed in response to questions about what did not happen, rather than why rights and political practices developed in the manner that they did. This paper seeks to break from this trend and to place the origins of debates about individual rights and citizenship within a wider historical context. That the Fundamental Rights could have secured a more secular and egalitarian state-society relationship rests on the assumption that the view of the individual citizen set out in their provisions has equal appeal and pertinence to all Indian citizens. By arguing that debates about reform of men’s property rights within the family were crucial in shaping the intellectual framework within which people were interested and willing to support the Fundamental Rights, this paper challenges this view. It shows how colonial understandings of the differences between Hindu and Muslim family law meant that the liberal framework of individual rights expounded in the Fundamental Rights held particular appeal for Hindu men in a way that it did not for Muslims and other social groups. Tracing the pressures and interests driving legislative debates about personal law, the first part of this paper shows that disputes about property rights, together with the development of new structures of political representation, helped to generate much discussion amongst Indian men about legal rights and reform. The particular emphasis placed on scriptural authority in colonial interpretations of Muslim law prompted Muslim lawyers to call for reform by challenging colonial interpretations of Muslim family practices. Similar arguments were later taken up by Hindu reformers seeking to change their own legal system. Yet, colonial perceptions of Hindu law as a product of social evolution more than scriptural authority meant that Hindu reformers framed their arguments in more secular terms than their Muslim counterparts. Turning in particular on the historical position of women in Hindu society vis-à-vis their place under European legal structures, the debates about Hindu law reform often suggested a close link between the individual of the Hindu law debates and that of western liberal political-thought, a claim that had much potency for those wishing to question the civilizing mission and political legitimacy of the colonial state. By the early twentieth century, a significant group of influential Hindu men appeared to be open to the development of a framework of rights influenced by secular, liberal ideals. On closer inspection, however, Hindu reformers were not calling for freedom and rights for everyone. Like the Muslim lawyers before them,

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Hindu legislators were interested not only in undermining the legal structures that had developed under colonial rule, but also in imposing new ones that strengthened their own power. As a result, in certain key regards, the citizen-subject that emerged in this period was not the free individual in touch with the state, but firmly tied to the power structures of the community governed by Hindu law. Exploring the debates that shaped the Fundamental Rights, the aim of this paper is not simply to challenge the accepted periodization of twentieth-century Indian history. It also seeks to question the degree to which we can divide and treat as separate categories the notion of colonial subject and independent citizenship in India. The preindependence debates about personal law reform demonstrate clearly the significance of colonial legal structures in shaping post-colonial citizenship and Indians’ attitudes towards the independent state.

Rights and the individual under colonial family law The particular structure of the Anglo-Indian legal system had longterm implications for debates about rights in India. From the outset of British rule, officials distinguished between a public legal sphere, governing relations in the market place, and the private or personal realm of the family, which was administered according to subjects’ own religious customs and traditions.5 As many scholars have highlighted, the ways in which officials ‘protected’ indigenous customs served in fact to rigidify these practices in a manner that often benefited the power relationships on which colonial governance depended.6 British assumptions about the importance of scriptural legal sources and religious traditions shaped the ways in which officials ‘discovered’ Indian traditions and recorded them under different categories of Hindu and Muslim practices, a distinction that was to grow more rigid over the course of colonial rule.7 Under Mughal rule, religious 5

Washbrook, ‘Law, State and Agrarian Society’, pp. 653–655. David Gilmartin, ‘Kinship, Women and Politics’ in G. Minault (ed.), The Extended Family: Women and Political Participation in India and Pakistan (Chanakya Publications, Delhi, 1981), pp. 151–170; Lata Mani, Contentious Traditions: the Debate on Sati in Colonial India (University of California Press, Berkeley, 1998), Veena Talwar Oldenberg, Dowry Murder: the Imperial Origins of a Cultural Crime (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2002). 7 Bernard Cohn, ‘Law and the Colonial State in India’ in Bernard Cohn, Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge: the British in India (Chichester, Princeton, 1996), pp. 57–75. 6

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scripture had played a crucial role in legal governance. Precedent was given to interpretive practice, so that legal scholars, or qadis, applied the principles of the Qur’an and other Islamic legal texts to a particular situation, rather than a literal reading of their precepts. The desire of British officials to establish definite knowledge of their new subjects led them to emphasize these texts as definite sources in and of themselves, eroding the place of legal interpretation and the more flexible, socially-conditional nature of the legal system. Legal scholars of the Hanafi school had been particularly productive under Mughal rule and these texts were given precedence in colonial interpretations of Muslim law over other schools of legal thought.8 Thus, in focusing on text as the main source of religious law, British administrators glossed over not only divisions between Sunni and Shi’a Muslims but also many of the different schools of legal scholarship that had evolved under Mughal rule. Certain customary practices were retained but, by the mid-nineteenth century, Muslim personal law had emerged as a clearly defined, text-based legal structure that could be easily applied and hard to dispute.9 British interpretations of Islamic succession law rested on a reading of the al-Sirajiyya, another Hanafi text.10 Prescribing the division of a man’s property between all his children, rather than a system of primogeniture, these practices were regarded as far more equitable than English succession law.11 In spite of this, officials were somewhat selective in the way in which they applied the principles of the al-Sirajiyya. Directives to include daughters in the division of a father’s estate were, in many parts of India, ignored in favour of customary 8 Charles Hamilton’s four volume translation of the Hidaya—a collection of Hanafi legal opinions—was published in 1791 and for much of colonial rule, the main English translation of this Islamic text. The Hidaya did not include any discussion of inheritance practices, and British knowledge of Indian Muslim inheritance law developed on the basis of William Jones’ translation of another Islamic text, alSirajiyya, which appeared the following year in 1792. Michael Anderson, ‘Islamic Law and the Colonial Encounter’ in David Arnold and Peter Robb (eds) Ideologies and Institutions: A SOAS South Asia Reader (Curzon, Richmond, 1995) pp. 171–178, especially pp. 174–175. 9 Scott Alan Kugle, ‘Framed, Blamed and Renamed: the Recasting of Islamic Jurisprudence in Colonial South Asia’, Modern Asian Studies, vol. 35, no. 2 (2001), pp. 257–313, especially pp. 300–301. 10 Gregory C. Kozlowski, Muslim Endowments and Society in British India (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1985), pp. 128–131. 11 David S. Powers, ‘Orientalism, Colonialism and Legal History: the Attack on Muslim Family Endowments in Algeria and India’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 31, no. 3, (July, 1989), p. 556.

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practices, which sidelined women heirs and limited a woman’s hold over property to her lifetime only. The colonial courts upheld customary practices in a rather erratic manner, exempting some Muslim families and clans from a strict application of Islamic law.12 These cases aside, British jurists’ emphasis on religious scripture often served to strengthen Muslim women’s claims to property. This was particularly true in terms of Muslim women’s right to mehr, the property promised to a Muslim bride as part of the marriage contract, the payment of which, unlike a dowry, is often deferred.13 In a number of prominent cases, the colonial courts ruled in favour of a Muslim woman’s right to mehr, granting her control over part of her husband’s estate until this was paid.14 Though it did not always translate into secure legal rights in terms of women’s day-to-day life, in principle, colonial Muslim law acknowledged the legal personhood and property-owning capacity of Muslim women. Indeed, this became one of the central features defining Muslim family practices against those of Hindus: Muslim families were considered to comprise propertyowning individuals, whereas the natural condition of a Hindu family was assumed to be ‘joint’.15 Although the focus on religious scripture seemed to give greater outline to a system of Muslim law, the same could not be said in terms of Hindu law. The plethora of Hindu religious texts and wide differences in regional practices meant that Hindu law was more open to interpretation by colonial scholars. The ideas of one British legal scholar were particularly important in reshaping Hindu law in this period. Henry Sumner Maine, an eminent scholar of civil and Roman law, in 1861 published his Ancient Law: its connection with the early history of society, and its relation to modern ideas, in which he argued

12 Ayesha Jalal, Self and Sovereignty: Individual and Community in South Asian Islam Since 1850 (Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2001), pp. 150–153; Bina Agarwal, A Field of One’s Own: Gender and Land Rights in South Asia (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1994), pp. 118–119, 288–289; Agriculturalist Muslims in Punjab were governed according to an entirely separate regional system of customary law, see, N. Hancock Prenter, ‘Custom in the Punjab’ Parts I and II in Journal of Comparative Legislation and International Law, 3rd Ser. 6, no. 1 (1924), pp. 67–80; and Ibid. 6, no. 4 (1924), pp. 223–237. 13 Bina Agarwal, A Field of One’s Own, pp. 227–230. 14 G. C. Kozlowski, ‘Muslim Women and the Control of Property in North India’, Indian Economic and Social History Review, vol. 24 (1987), pp. 163–181. 15 Lucy Carroll ‘Daughter’s Rights of Inheritance in India: a Perspective on the Problem of Dowry’, Modern Asian Studies, vol. 25, no. 4 (Oct 1991), pp. 791–809, especially p. 794.

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that contemporary Hindu law operated in a similar way as had ancient Roman law. Ancient Roman law was, according to Maine, organized around the principle of Patria potestas, meaning that the head of the family held power to the complete negation of the claims of individual members. Within this system younger men had some authority as potential family heads but a woman remained, for the duration of her lifetime, the powerless dependent, first of her father and then the head of her husband’s family. This status was known as ‘perpetual tutelage’. While western society had long advanced from this state of affairs, Maine argued, such ‘progress’ had never taken place in India so that this legal system, ‘survives in absolute completeness’.16 The thesis won Maine much public attention and in 1862 he took up the post of legal member of the Viceroy’s Council. In the law reforms over which he presided, the idea of the joint family became the one legal structure that was seen to underpin regionally diverse systems of Hindu law. While the joint family was common amongst Hindus and Muslims as a sociological unit—i.e. a family of multiple generations sharing a single home—under Maine’s reforms the joint family came to be seen as the primary legal unit of Hindu society. Under both Mitakshara and Dayabhaga, the two dominant schools of Hindu law, a Hindu man was entitled to hold self-acquired properties individually.17 The family estate, however, was held as a collective. The nature of the collective varied between the two schools. Under Dayabhaga law, governing Hindus in Bengal and parts of Assam, the ‘joint family’ was understood as something like a compact between property owning individuals. Members held a fixed share of the estate that, on their death, passed to close family relatives, including widows. Under Mitakshara law which governed Hindus almost everywhere else in India,18 the joint family unit was considered a single entity within which there were no 16 Maine, Ancient Law (1906) pp. 157–158, cited in D. N. Mitter, The Position of Women in Hindu Law, (Inter-India Publications, Calcutta, 1913; reprinted New Delhi, 1989), pp. 122–123. Maine’s thesis owed much to ideas of Social Darwinism shaping intellectual thought at this time. See Leigh Denault, ‘Partition and the Joint Family in Nineteenth-century North India’, Indian Economic and Social History Review, vol. 46, no. 1 (2009) especially pp. 32–40. 17 For a fuller description of succession practices and rights under the schools of Hindu law see Bina Agarwal, A Field of One’s Own, pp. 85–91. 18 One important exception to this is the matrilineal schools of law in operation in Southern India. However, even these were organized around a joint family system, known as a tarwad, which operated much like the coparcenary system, except that property passed along the maternal line. N. R. Raghavachariar, Hindu Law:

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individual shares—much like in the ancient Roman family. Known as a ‘coparcenary’, this unit comprised up to four generations of male relatives whose share in the family estate shrank with a new birth and grew with a coparcenary member’s death. Yet, the coparcenary was not open to all family members. The principles governing the devolution of property varied between the two schools of Hindu law, Mitakshara operating on the basis of propinquity, or blood relationship, and Dayabhaga on the basis of a relative’s ability to perform certain oblations and ceremonies that would bestow virtue upon the dead. Both concepts operated in a manner that gave preference to sons and male relatives and barred women from membership of the joint estate.19 Even within the Mitakshara family, coparceners’ shared property rights did not translate into equal access to and influence over the family estate. The coparcenary was managed, on behalf of others, by the eldest member, usually the father, who was known as a karta. While no decision could be made without the full consent of all coparceners, the karta enjoyed a stronger influence over the family estate. Thus, the capacity of younger men to exercise their right to a share of the joint family property was limited by the very hierarchical structure of power within the family. Individual rights and legal powers were largely absent from AngloHindu marriage law also. The reformed Hindu personal law endorsed the claims that had long been advanced by upper caste Hindu leaders that ‘true’ Hindu marriage was a sacrament and not, as was the case under British and Muslim personal law, a contract.20 Just as the coparcenary transcended the individuals which it comprised, so marriage transformed the couple into an inseparable unit. While in principle conjugal partners were equal, Hindu property law meant that, by virtue of his greater economic powers, a husband could dominate his wife. Barred from entering her natal coparcenary, a woman had little legal claim to parental support following marriage, when she became the dependent not simply of her husband but of his coparcenary. In this way the sacramental marital unit worked in Principles and Precedents, Vol. II (Madras Law Journal Office, Madras, 1935, 1980 edn), pp. 703–704; Bina Agarwal, A Field of One’s Own, pp. 109–120. 19 Bina Agarwal, A Field of One’s Own, pp. 88–89. 20 See Aishika Chakrabarti, ‘Widowhood in Colonial Bengal 1850–1930’, Unpublished thesis, University of Calcutta (2004); Samita Sen, ‘Offences Against Marriage: Negotiating Custom in Colonial Bengal’, in Mary E. John and Janaki Nair (eds), A Question of Silence? The Sexual Economies of Modern India (Kali for Women, New Delhi, 1998), pp. 77–110.

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tandem with the coparcenary system to support a very hierarchical system of patriarchal legal authority.

Contesting colonial law: religious tradition versus legal modernization Administrative streamlining and legal reforms in the 1860s further consolidated and codified colonial interpretations of personal law. These changes did not bring about sweeping changes in domestic practices or serve to ‘reinvent’ Indian family life, but rather set the framework within which family disputes would be judged and mediated by the colonial courts.21 Wide ranging social and economic changes in the second half of the nineteenth century served to make such disputes increasingly likely.22 It was not only the legal system that underwent comprehensive reform in this period. The transition to Crown rule was accompanied by the extensive restructuring and expansion of the colonial administration, creating new employment and education possibilities for Indians.23 This was also a period of economic transformation as the Indian economy emerged from a state of agrarian stagnation to become a major provider in global trading networks.24 Together these developments helped to drive urban expansion, a process that drew people to cities and created new ties between urban areas and their rural hinterlands, both in terms of patterns of exchange and, with the railway networks, in terms of physical contact.25 21 Eleanor Newbigin, Leigh Denault and Rohit De, ‘Personal Law, Identity Politics and Civil Society in Colonial South Asia’, Indian Economic and Social History Review, vol. 46, no. 1 (2009), pp. 1–4. 22 Mytheli Sreenivas has shown that, in Madras, litigation rates for cases involving Hindu family property grew considerably in this period; disputes grew in Madras from the second half of the nineteenth century onwards. Mytheli Sreenivas, ‘Conjugality and Capital: Gender, Families, and Property under Colonial Law in India’, Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 63, no. 4 (2004), pp. 937–960, especially p. 944. fn 11. 23 B. B. Misra, The Indian Middle Classes (Oxford University Press, London, 1961), pp. 308–324. 24 Washbrook, ‘Law, Sate and Agrarian Society’, pp. 669–673. 25 C. J. Baker, An Indian Rural Economy 1880–1955: The Tamilnad Countryside (Clarendon, Oxford, 1984), especially pp. 241–249 and 414–420; Tanika Sarkar, Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation (Permanent Black, New Delhi, 2001), pp. 8–16; Rajnarayan Chandavarkar, The Origins of Industrial Capitalism in India: Business Strategies and the Working Classes in Bombay 1900–1940 (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1994), pp. 23–67.

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The way in which Indians experienced these expanding opportunities was deeply informed by the structures of property law. Wealthy Muslim families found that the colonial state’s interpretation of Islamic succession laws made it difficult for them to build up their wealth and to protect their estates against fragmentation and profligate relatives in the future.26 In other Muslim countries, in the Middle East in particular, Muslims used waqf law, a system of endowment similar to trust in English common law, as a means of circumventing the Islamic legal prescriptions about dividing an estate between family members. Derived from the Arabic waqafa meaning to stop or hold, a waqf estate was one that could not be affected by succession practices, by sale or by seizure.27 A waqf was most commonly made to endow a religious or community institution, for example a madrassah or hospital. But, it also allowed families to manage the transmission of considerable wealth from one generation to the next, creating something like a trust-fund for future generations that was protected against interference by non-family members.28 In India, however, the focus on text rather than custom led officials to conclude that private waqf had no basis in Islamic law and that the only legal use of waqf law was to endow public institutions.29 In the rapidly changing social and economic context of the late nineteenth century, Muslim lawyers and landholders expressed great frustration at this interpretation of waqf law. Amongst wealthy Hindus, however, it was colonial jurists’ emphasis on joint, rather then individual, rights that created difficulties. The 1860 law reforms enforced the joint family at precisely the moment when wider trends were placing this structure under pressure. 26 Muslims governed by customary legal systems, especially those in Punjab and Bengal, were not affected by this reading of waqf law in quite the same way. Powers, ‘Orientalism, Colonialism, and Legal History’, pp. 554–560. See also Kozlowski, Muslim Endowments, pp. 71–72 and footnote 10 above. 27 Kozlowski, Muslim Endowments, pp. 1–3. 28 Ibid, pp. 10–14; The use of waqf law in this developed in the Ottoman Empire during the eighteenth century in response to the state’s fiscal policies but became an even more popular way of protecting a family’s hold over land in the nineteenth century, with the expansion of colonial power in this region. Powers, ‘Orientalism, Colonialism and Legal History’, pp. 537–538. 29 Kugle, ‘Framed, Blamed and Renamed’, pp. 286–294. Debates about the public and private character of the waqf were paralleled by debates about private trusts governed by Hindu law. On the emergence of this notion of public economic space and its impact on Hindu personal legal structures see Ritu Birla, Stages of Capital: Law, Culture and Market Governance in Late Colonial India (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2009).

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Increasing land sales in certain areas raised questions about the operation of the coparcenary system vis-à-vis contractual rights. The ‘unfixed’ nature of the shares in the coparcenary and the need to take into account the possibility of future, unborn coparceners created confusion about the ability of a karta to enter into contractual arrangements concerning the joint estate.30 Social changes in this period also created tension within the joint family unit. Urban migration divided larger families geographically, creating new households with their own demands for resources. The increase in salaried employment was also a source of confusion. There was much legal debate about whether salary was the property of the earner or his family, particularly if the former had been the recipient of a specialist or expensive education.31 Family disputes about such questions began to spill out of the home and into the courts, and the late nineteenth century saw a rapid increase in the number of cases involving coparcenary rights.32 Later political reforms and the expansion of political representation for Indians meant that these discussions also began to enter the legislatures. While British officials cited the policy of religious neutrality to distance themselves from these debates, many Indian legislators were only too keen to use their newfound power to improve their own economic interests. Differences in the ways in which religious personal law had been interpreted under British rule affected the ways in which Hindu and Muslim representatives called for reform. In terms of Muslim law, the colonial state’s emphasis on textual authority in Islamic law meant that to oppose existing waqf regulations on the grounds that they were out of date or inappropriate for contemporary Indian society raised questions about the relationship between scripture and modern Muslim society in general. Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan, an eminent thinker and reformer, campaigned vigorously to highlight the economic and social difficulties suffered by Muslim families under 30 Alan Gledhill, ‘The Influence of Common Law and Equity on Hindu Law Since 1800’, The International and Comparative Law Quarterly, vol. 3, no. 4 (1954) pp. 581–587; Rachel Sturman, ‘Property and Attachments: Defining Autonomy and the Claims of Family in Nineteenth-century Western India’, Comparative Studies in Society and History vol. 47, no. 3 (2005), pp. 611–637. 31 Note by J. A. Baines, on special duty for the purpose of Income Tax Act, 17 August, 1886, National Archives of India, New Delhi (hereafter NAI), GOI Finance Department, Separate Revenue—A Proceedings, January 1887, nos. 37–46. 32 For a summary of Privy Council rulings on this matter see the Statement of Objects and Reasons to Hari Singh Gour’s Bill to define the liability of a Hindu coparcener, (NAI) GOI Home Department, Judicial F. 407/1924.

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existing legal arrangements. He faced much opposition from other Muslim representatives, however, and in 1879, was forced to withdraw legislative proposals to reform waqf law following criticism that they contravened the textual basis of Islamic law.33 Hindu reformers experienced similar problems. In 1891, a year before the Indian Councils Act was passed, Vembakkam Bhashyam Iyengar introduced to the Madras Legislature a Gains of Learning Bill that sought to confirm a Hindu man’s salaried earnings as his individual property rather than part of the coparcenary estate. While the Bill won the support of ‘professional groups’, opponents argued that it attacked the family unit that formed the foundation of Hindu society and religion.34 Cautious of provoking civil unrest, British officials vetoed the measure on the grounds that it marked a departure from Hindu tradition. Muslim lawyers played a pivotal role in reframing the terms of the debate about personal law reform away from the deadlock between arguments about tradition and innovation. Turning the Privy Council’s own defence of Islamic legal tradition on its head, lawyers such as Amir Ali argued that a waqf made to benefit a family had always been permitted under Muslim law. Far from upholding ancient practice, colonial waqf law was itself a ‘modern’ innovation or corruption of ‘true’ religious practice. The assertion of Muslim autonomy to decide correct religious tradition won support from many religious leaders and ulama who were not so closely tied to the government. Thus, although these arguments were made to defend the economic interests of social groups traditionally allied to the colonial state, they helped to construct an image of Islamic unity. Maintaining this ‘communal unity’ was particularly important to Mohammad Ali Jinnah. The successful Bombay lawyer had, by the early twentieth century, become well known for his political activity and involvement with the Indian National Congress. While he supported co-operation between Hindu and Muslim politicians, he also believed firmly in the distinct interests, needs and identities of the two religious groups and, from 1913, was a member of both Congress and the Muslim League.35 Jinnah’s legal practices became increasingly

33

Kozlowski, Muslim Endowments, pp. 159–162. Sreenivas, ‘Conjugality and Capital’ pp. 944–945. 35 Jinnah abandoned the Congress following its Nagpur session in 1920, Matlubul Hasan Saiyid Mohammad Ali Jinnah: A Political Study (Sh. Muhammad Ashraf, Lahore, 1945; 1953 edn), pp. 125–135. 34

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bound up with his political ambitions; in the same year that he joined the League, Jinnah helped to secure the passage of the Mussalman Wakf Validating Act, which made a ‘family waqf’ legitimate on the grounds that this represented a more authentic interpretation of Islamic legal tradition.36 The act did not bring an immediate end to debates about Muslim family property; problems with retrospective application and administration of the new rights prompted a flurry of further bills over the next decade.37 But it did succeed in bringing waqf law in line with the needs and interests of wealthy Muslims without challenging the specifically religious identity of Muslim law. Its passage marked out waqf law particularly, and Muslim law more generally, as a domain best administered by learned Muslims than by colonial jurists. Hindu reformers were quick to follow this lead. Moving the emphasis in their arguments away from criticism of actual religious traditions focused instead on the way they had been interpreted by British judges. One of the key works to take on the issue of Hindu law reform in this way was Dwarka Nath Mitter’s The Position of Women under Hindu Law.38 Published the year that the Wakf Validating Act was passed, Mitter’s comprehensive history of Hindu women’s rights seemed to draw much inspiration from Muslim lawyers’ criticism of colonial understandings of traditional practices. Mitter refuted Maine’s claim that Hindu law reflected a perfect continuation of Roman law, particularly with regards to Patria potestas. Prior to British rule, Mitter argued, Hindu law had been a very fluid and dynamic legal system. Contemporary legal difficulties were not a result of social stagnation but of colonial officials’ limited linguistic skills and misunderstanding of the role of Pandit counsel. Drawing on his own translations of the Rig Veda, one of the oldest Vedic texts, Mitter argued that Maine and his colleagues had misunderstood the real meaning of women’s dependency in the ancient Hindu texts. A Hindu woman was brought under the legal authority of her family to preserve her chastity and protect her from vice. But this was not a state 36 While waqf is now the common spelling used for this term, the 1913 Act used this older construction. I cite the formal title of the act, rather than amending it in line with modern usage. Kozlowski, Muslim endowments, pp. 177–191. 37 Indeed, reform of waqf law also continued after independence, though it was much more concerned with waqf management than with family entitlement. Khalid Rashid, Wakf administration in India (Vikas, New Delhi, 1978), pp. 23–35. 38 Mitter, The Position of Women under Hindu Law (Calcutta, 1913; reprinted New Delhi, 1989).

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of ‘perpetual tutelage’ or a denial of legal personhood: a Hindu woman ‘was not prevented by reason of her dependence from performing any juristic act (e.g. contract of sale or loan) without the concurrent auctoritas of the guardian’.39 Far from being fossilized, Mitter argued, these practices and rights had been whittled away over time to become the corrupted and inauthentic legal system administered by the colonial courts. In this way, his book subverted Maine’s argument about the social evolution of Hindu society, while also challenging more long standing colonial claims about the relationship between the status of women and a society’s fitness for self-rule. While there were many similarities between the arguments about religious tradition and colonial interpretation put forward by Mitter and the Muslim lawyers involved in the debates about waqf, there was one important difference. Responding to the heavy emphasis placed on doctrinal teaching in colonial interpretations of Muslim law, Jinnah and his colleagues had framed their arguments in terms of religion: the current legal system needed to be reformed because it subverted ‘true’ Islamic practice by applying an incorrect reading of Muslim family law. The absence, in colonial interpretations of Hindu law, of a scriptural bases equivalent to that of colonial Islamic law meant that Mitter’s argument was framed in ‘secular’ terms. Engaging with debates about Roman civil law and notions of social progress, Mitter cited history, rather than religious doctrine, to support personal law reform. In so doing, his thesis sought to bring together a sense of Hindu nationhood based on a glorious, ancient past, with concern about women’s status in contemporary Indian society. While couched in terms of concern for women’s interests, this critique of Anglo-Hindu law also offered certain advantages to Hindu men. The principle of Patria potestas did not simply underpin the exclusion of women from the family estate; granting power to the eldest male in the family, the karta, it was the cornerstone of male subordination within the family. As with Muslim lawyers’ arguments about waqf, Mitter’s account of the historical development of Hindu law intersected with a drive to improve men’s property rights under the current legal system. The emphasis on social evolution in colonial accounts of the development of Hindu law meant that, while Muslim lawyers focused on religious text, Mitter’s argument focused on women’s rights and more secular arguments about social progress.

39

Ibid., p. 124.

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His argument was not evidence of more liberal attitudes amongst Hindu lawyers, but a reflection of the structures of colonial personal law.

Devolution and personal law reform in the 1920s Devolution under the 1919 Government of India Act allowed debates about personal law reform to be drawn into the Indian legislatures. The early 1920s saw the introduction of several private members bills that, if they did not attack the Hindu coparcenary structure directly, sought to grant greater legitimacy to alternative family setups within which individual rights received greater acknowledgement. Most of these proposals came from lawyers in the Presidency regions.40 The bills were framed largely in the language of women’s rights, proposing reforms that would secure a widow’s access to her husband’s share in coparcenary property, either directly or through maintenance claims.41 Government officials remained neutral towards these measures. This meant that most proposals failed to even make it onto the floor of the Assembly, having been given very low placing on a legislative ballot list that prioritized government business. Outside the legislatures, the bills were accompanied by attempts to raise popular interest in the subject of women’s rights and law reforms. These campaigns were also dominated by politically ambitious members of the legal profession. In 1923, Mukund Ramrao Jayakar, a lawyer from Bombay city, and later a legislative representative for that region, founded the Hindu Law Research and Reform Association (HLRRA). One of the primary aims of the HLRRA was to uncover the ‘principles underlying the system of Hindu Law. . .[and]. . .propose legislation with a view to rectify errors in the administration of Hindu Law, arising from departure from the true spirit of the Hindu Code. . .’ under British rule.42 Anxious to avoid the label of ‘radical modernizer’, Jayakar’s view of pre-colonial Hindu law echoed Mitter’s views: British 40 These included R. R. Kale, a lawyer from Maharashtra and Sambanda Mudaliar, a lawyer from Georgetown in the Madras Presidency. See Eleanor Newbigin, ‘The Hindu Code Bill and the Making of the Modern Indian State’, Unpublished thesis, University of Cambridge (2008). 41 Eleanor Newbigin, ‘A Post-Colonial Patriarchy? Representing the Family in the Indian Nation-State’, Modern Asian Studies, vol. 44, no. 1, (2010), pp. 133–137. 42 Undated pamphlet setting out the Aims and Objectives of the All-India Hindu Law Research and Reform Association (NAI), M. R. Jayakar Papers F.4.

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rulers had, as a result of linguistic limitations and ignorance of Hindu life, misinterpreted Sanskrit legal texts to establish a rigid system of law that served neither Hindu traditions nor the interests of the community.43 These ideas were further elaborated through public meetings and printed pamphlets put out by the Association’s regional groups.44 The debates about Hindu law reform were important in shaping male legislators’ attitudes towards the claims and programmes of the all-India women’s groups founded at this time. In the decade following World War I three all-India women’s organizations were set up.45 Women members of these organizations were interested in a broad range of issues, including legal reform and women’s position and rights within the home. The emergence of these groups has typically been seen as a moment in which Indian women refused to be the subjects of reform but became interested in shaping and changing their lives and social status themselves. While this was undoubtedly an important transition, the success of women’s organizations’ campaigns and their growing prominence in Indian political life owed much to the constellation of male interests around the issue of women’s rights in the context of personal law reform. The three all-India women’s organizations strongly eschewed religious alignment, their leaders often arguing that women’s politics formed a vital foundation for cross-communal unity.46 Yet, the particular significance of arguments about women’s rights for Hindu property law meant that, at times, the women’s movement seemed to enjoy a stronger relationship with Hindu legislators than with their Muslim counterparts.47 By the late 1920s, therefore, ideas about women’s rights had seemed to gain 43 Letter from Jayakar to Law Minister, N. N. Sircar, 16th August, 1936, (NAI) M. R. Jayakar Papers F.4. 44 The HLRRA had branches in Bengal, Allahabad and Nagpur. A collection of their written material and minutes is available in (NAI) M. R. Jayakar Papers F. 4. 45 These were the Women’s Indian Association (WIA), founded in 1917, the National Council of Women in India (NCWI), established in 1925 and the All India Women’s Conference (AIWC), which met for the first time in 1927 to discuss women’s education but rapidly grew into a more permanent organization. Geraldine Forbes, Women in Modern India (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1996), pp. 72–91; Catherine Candy ‘Competing Transnational Representations of the 1930s Indian Franchise Question’, in Ian Christopher Fletcher, et al. (eds), Women’s Suffrage in the British Empire (Routledge, London, 2000), pp. 191–206. A. Basu and B. Ray Women’s Struggle: a History of the All-India Women’s Conference 1927–1990 (Manohar, Delhi, 1990). 46 Basu and Ray, Women’s Struggle, pp. 19–21, 28–29. 47 M. R. Jayakar of the HLRRA was very involved with and regularly contacted for advice and to lend public support to the campaigns of the All-India Women’s

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considerable acceptance and support from Hindu male representatives and spokesmen in particular. This relationship was to prove significant with regard to the most celebrated personal law reform project of this period—the Child Marriage Restraint Act. Mrinalini Sinha has shown how political devolution within India, together with shifts in global imperial politics, created a brief window within which it was possible to pass this groundbreaking act—the only family law measure to cut across the religious-based personal laws that has ever been passed in India.48 Yet, support for the act was also much informed by the longer running discussions about law reform amongst Hindu and Muslim legislators. The publication of Katherine Mayo’s inflammatory Mother India in 1927 served to place the issue of women’s rights at the forefront of debates about further constitutional reforms and therefore to imbue this issue with even greater significance in relation to arguments about Indians’ fitness for self-rule. Passed in response to Mayo’s claims, Sinha has shown how the Child Marriage Restraint Act undercut the colonial state’s paternalist claims. Introduced initially as a private member’s bill, this act was heralded as evidence of the fact that Indians, and not British officials, were the primary agents of social reform. As such, the act served to further affirm the earlier claims of Jinnah and Mitter that Indians, rather than British officials, possessed the greatest power to effect social and legal change. Focused on the right of the child bride to claim protection from the state, and not simply her family, the Child Marriage Restraint Act was undoubtedly a groundbreaking measure. Its passage served to place issues of women’s rights squarely at the centre of the ongoing debates about religious authority and personal law. Yet, the act was not different enough from the claims made in these debates to create a real or permanent rupture in the boundaries of masculine autonomy and religious identity that informed these discussions. Male reformers continued to call for law reform in a manner that seemed to address concerns about women’s rights but which remained wholly in keeping with their own propertied and political interests. Muslim reformers did this by further invoking the religious identity of their legal system. For Hindus, however, the issues raised by the Mother India episode forced reformers to call for greater legislative intervention in Hindu Conference as well as more local Bombay Women’s Organisations, such as the Bombay Presidency Women’s Council. See (NAI) M. R. Jayakar Papers F.215, 217, 523. 48 Mrinalini Sinha, Specters of Mother India.

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law. While this created specific problems from Hindu legislators, it also allowed them to associate their demands with the radical, ‘modernizing’ drive of the Child Marriage Restraint Act in a way that their Muslim colleagues could not.49

Reinforcing the religious/liberal divide: law reform in the 1930s Debates about personal law reform in the 1930s were marked by a strengthening, rather than weakening, of the religious divide. When they came to take their seats in 1937, newly-elected members of the central legislature found themselves facing a long list of social reform proposals which had been put on hold during the constitutional debates of the late 1920s and early 1930s. This included two highly publicized measures, Dr G. V. Deshmukh’s Hindu Women’s Right to Property Bill and Mr H. M. Abdullah’s Muslim Personal Law (Shariat) Application Bill, which proposed comprehensive reform of the Hindu and Muslim personal legal structures respectively. In the wake of the Mayocontroversy, both were framed as measures to reform the legal and social status of Indian women, though, once again, Hindu and Muslim reformers used quite different arguments to promote their proposals. In early 1935, H. M. Abdullah sought government permission to introduce what was to become known as the Shariat Application Bill. This bill was virtually a replica of a measure proposed, but never formally introduced, by Mian Abdul Haye, an urban representative of the Punjab Unionist Party, in 1929, at the height of the agitation against Mother India.50 Both Haye and Abdullah presented the bill as an attempt to improve the condition of Muslim women. Yet, their argument as to how the bill would do this had much in common with the criticism of colonial interpretation of religious practices raised in the waqf debates. As already discussed, colonial readings of Muslim law had drawn heavily on textual sources but continued to uphold certain customary practices. This meant that the legal 49 On the relationship between modernity and the Child Marriage Restraint Act see, Mrinalini Sinha, ‘The Lineage of the “Indian” Modern: Rhetoric, Agency and the Sarda Act in Late Colonial India’ in A. Burton (ed.), Gender, Sexuality and Colonial Modernities (Routledge: London, 1999), pp. 207–220. 50 Haye went on to become Minister for Education in UP, see Ian Talbot, Khizr Tiwana, the Punjab Unionist Party and the Partition of India (Curzon, Richmond, 1996), p. 90, and Chapter 5, fn 42.

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system governing Indian Muslims’ families varied according to region and ‘tribal’ community. Though the colonial courts had often upheld Muslim women’s claims to mehr, in other areas of life, customary practices were cited as a means of preventing Muslim women from exercising the property rights set out in text-based Islamic law. This was certainly the case in Mian Abdul Haye’s homeland of Punjab where Muslim agriculturalists were governed by a customary legal system.51 In the wake of the Mayo controversy, the argument for eradicating regional differences in Muslim law went hand in hand with arguments about women’s rights. Introducing the bill, H. M. Abdullah explained that he wished to replace the degraded and unjust colonial legal system with a more authentic interpretation of Muslim law that was far more socially progressive. The state of Muslim Women under customary law is simply disgraceful. The Muslim women’s organisations have condemned customary law as it adversely affects their rights and have demanded that the Muslim Personal Law (Shariat) should be made applicable to them. The introduction of the Muslim Personal Law will automatically raise them to the position to which they are naturally entitled.52

In this way, the bill sought to reinforce the claim made about the Child Marriage Restraint Act, that the primary agent of social reform was not the colonial state but Indians, or in the case of the Shariat Bill, Indian Muslims. At the same time, the bill appealed to Muslim opponents of the Child Marriage Restraint Act; the original wording of early drafts of the bill proposed that Shariat law replace all other laws currently governing Indian Muslims, opening up a possibility for Muslims to exempt themselves from Act XIX of 1929.53 Both supporters and opponents of the bill referred to the fact that its provisions presented Muslim law as distinctly religious in nature. Responding to a government request for opinions on the bill, the Deputy Commissioner of Akola, Central Provinces, questioned the wisdom of a measure that enforced the Shariat as an immutable 51

David Gilmartin, ‘Kinship, Women and Politics’, see also footnote 12, above. From the Statement of Objects and Reasons in support of the Shariat Application Act 1937, cited in Janaki Nair, Women and Law in Colonial India: a Social History (Kali for Women, Delhi, 1996), p. 193. 53 The Government of India insisted that this reference to ‘law’ be altered before the bill was enacted, so that, in the end, the measure affected only customary practice and not statute. See extract from Legislative Assembly Debates, Vol. V., no. 11, 16 September, 1937, pp. 9–13. (NAI) GOI Home Department F.28/34/1938— Judicial. 52

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legal system that could not be adapted and developed by legislative intervention. ‘However excellent a law the Shariat might have been in the past and however excellent it might be even today’, he argued, ‘it cannot be said that nothing superior to it, or nothing more satisfactory than it, can be evolved in the march of human progress’. Yet for many other Muslim officials and lawyers interviewed by the government, this was one of the key reasons to support the bill. Mr K. M. Akram, a district and session pleader from the Central Provinces, supported the proposed changes to Muslim women’s rights, but also praised the manner in which the Bill reaffirmed the distinctly religious boundaries of Muslim law and its autonomy from secular statute.54 The Muslim Chambers of Commerce in Calcutta echoed this view, arguing that it would improve women’s rights and would also consolidate Muslim, rather than colonial, authority over property, including waqf trusts.55 Framed in terms of religion, the bill also triggered debate about the position of minority and convert Muslim communities, such as the Memons and Mappilas, who were still governed according to custom and more ‘Hindu-like’ legal systems.56 Mr M. J. Merchant, a joint subjudge in Dhulia in the Bombay Presidency, agreed with the supporters of the bill that ‘A true Moslem must follow Shariat in all his actions’. But went on to argue that, all Moslems are not true Moslems. Some of them accept only vital principles of Islam yet are Moslems. Why should they be forced by an enactment to accept other principles which they are not prepared to follow and which are not among the fundamental principles which a person has to accept to become a Moslem?

He was supported in this view by his colleague, an unnamed district judge from West Kandesh, also in Dhulia, who called for a distinction to be made between Islam as religion and Islam as a legal system. ‘It is possible to have one without the other’, he argued, ‘as is demonstrated by many communities in India which profess Islam’.57 Muslim supporters of the bill strongly refuted these arguments about 54 Précis of opinions on the Moslem Personal Law (Shariat) Application Bill— Paper I (NAI) GOI Home Department F.28/34/1938—Judicial. 55 See also views of Mohamad A. D. Arshad, Revenue Assistant in D. G. Khan District, Punjab, Précis of opinions on the Moslem Personal Law (Shariat) Application Bill—Paper III; Ibid. 56 See the opinion of the Commissioner, Northern Division, Dhulia, Bombay Presidency, in Précis of opinions on the Moslem Personal Law (Shariat) Application Bill—Paper II, Ibid. 57 Paper II, Ibid.

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difference amongst India’s Muslims. Indeed, the Anjuman Sabile Islamia of Gauhati, Assam, charged colonial courts with dividing the Muslim community by ‘enforcing’ custom upon certain groups and strongly supported the unifying element of the bill.58 The successful enactment of the bill owed much to the intervention of Mohammed Ali Jinnah, who only entered the debate during its final stages. While the select committee that considered it over the summer of 1937 resolved problems of wording, confusion remained about the way in which the measures would be implemented. Seeking to assert their own legislative autonomy, the Congress-dominated provincial assemblies put pressure on the Government of India to allow provinces to opt into the provisions set out by the bill. Keen to prevent this attempt to build a single Muslim community from becoming a measure that would augment regional difference between Indian Muslims, Jinnah stepped in. In September 1937 he proposed to make it compulsory for all Indian Muslims to be governed by Shariat law in terms of marriage, mehr, intestate succession and waqf law only. Muslims could continue to adhere to customary law in relation to intestate succession if they wished, but section 3 of the bill permitted them to sign a declaration that committed themselves and future generations to following the Shariat in this area of law also.59 The other aspect of succession law to be left outside the purview of the bill was access to agricultural land, reflecting the separation of federal and provincial subjects under the 1935 Government of India Act. This constitutional necessity made it much easier for powerful landowners in Bengal and Punjab to accept the Shariat Bill, the passage of which seemed to reinforce a notion of a single, coherent Muslim community in India which, in favouring women’s rights, was progressive in its outlook, but was fundamentally underpinned by religious identity and scriptural authority. Deshmukh’s Hindu Rights to Property Bill seemed to mirror the Shariat Application Act in that it set out to provide a comprehensive, codified set of property laws for Hindu women, that would bring into greater alignment regional customs and the practices of different schools of Hindu law. As with the private members bills discussed in the 1920s, at the heart of Deshmukh’s Bill was a notion of family based 58

Paper I, Ibid. Explanatory summary by Robert F. Mudie, Government of India, Home department, 11 September, 1937, (NAI) GOI Home Department, Judicial F.36/17/1935. 59

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on the conjugal unit and power of the husband, not the coparcenary and the karta. The most radical reform introduced under the Bill was the inclusion of a man’s widow and daughter in the list of heirs to succeed to his property, including his share in the family coparcenary.60 It also rendered a woman’s share in this property absolute, rather than for the duration of her lifetime. While there was much general support for the main principles of Deshmukh’s Bill, many legislators objected to certain aspects of its provisions. Officials in northern India felt that the proposals went too far in destroying the structure of the joint family, leaving women in a better financial position than Hindu men.61 Similar objections were raised in the discussions of the select committee and the bill was quite radically redrafted as a result. New clauses were added highlighting differences between the Mitakshara and Dayabhaga schools of law and any reference to the rights of the daughter was removed. The bill was finally enacted, in this redrafted form, in April 1937. Differences in the regional High Courts’ interpretations of the provisions of Deshmukh’s Act created further complication. The Shariat Act had been worded in such a way as to avoid this kind of confusion. There was no definition or detail of what constituted Shariat law in the provisions of the Shariat Application Act. Indeed, its supporters shied away from any reference to or engagement with the different schools or system of Muslim law, presenting Shariat law as a coherent system, the acceptance of which was understood to be closely bound up with good Islamic practice.62 The act simply listed the areas of law to which Indian Muslims were to be subject, giving Muslim jurists considerable power and autonomy to interpret what this in fact entailed. Rather than resolve or eradicate different opinions between Muslim jurists and scholars, in presenting Shariat law as a clear and 60 This would result in the gradual phasing out of the all-male coparcenary and a move to a situation in which property remained in the hands of a more nuclear family structure. Many representatives questioned this when the bill was circulated for opinion, some of them wondering whether this was a result of poor wording of the bill’s provisions. See for example the opinions of the Governor of Bombay and Mr Justice Munroe of Punjab ‘Précis of opinions on the Hindu Women’s Rights to Property Bill’. (NAI) GOI Home Department, Judicial F.28/25/1938. 61 Note from the Government of the United Provinces to the Secretary of the Government of India, Legislative Department, 15 January, 1935. (NAI) GOI Home Department, Judicial F.28/25/1938. 62 This point was raised by Khan Bahadur M. Sehamnad Sahib Bahadur, MLC of Madras in Précis of opinions on the Moslem Personal Law (Shariat) Application Bill—Paper I (NAI) GOI Home Department—Judicial F.28/34/1938.

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religious code of law, the act moved discussions of these differences from the public sphere to a more discrete field of inter-community dialogue. Hindu law had no comparable code or legal system on which Deshmukh could draw. His proposal was framed in terms of statute not religious precepts and, as such, was more open to dispute and legal revision within the legislature. Indeed, the act was amended in 1938 in order to set out more clearly the order of succession.63 But discussions about Hindu widows’ rights and Deshmukh’s measures continued nonetheless. Whereas the Shariat Act had provided a means of removing intraMuslim debate about family and religious practice from the legislature and projecting an image of community solidarity, Deshmukh’s Act seemed to open up new divisions and differences between Hindu representatives. Though Deshmukh and his supporters argued that their proposals did not radically alter Hindu law and were in consonance with ‘Hindu ideas and sentiments’,64 many of their opponents disagreed.65 Unable to refer to a clear and coherent religious code, like the view of Shariat law presented in the Shariat Act, supporters of Deshmukh’s Act framed their arguments more in relation to social justice and improving the position of women rather than to religious tradition. These arguments also generated opposition, even between those who supported reform; Bengali representatives argued that they should be exempt from some social reform measures because of the more progressive nature of Dayabhaga law, which did not follow the coparcenary system.66 By the end of 1939 a Hindu Law of Inheritance (Amendment) Bill, a Hindu Women’s Property Bill, a Hindu Women’s Estate Bill and a Hindu Married Women’s Right to Separate Residence and Maintenance Bill along 63 The Hindu Women’s Rights to Property (Amendment) Act, (Act XI of 1938). (NAI) GOI Home Department F.364/1937—Judicial. 64 Statement of object of reasons from a Bill to amend the Hindu Women’s Right to Property Act, 1937, introduced by Mr G. S. Motilal in July 1938. (NAI) GOI Home Department—Judicial F.28/13/1938. 65 In a summary of official opinion on G. S. Motilal’s 1938 bill to amend the Hindu Women’s Right to Property Act, a member of the Government of India explained that the main criticism of the measure was that, ‘The Bill is fundamentally opposed to the principles of Hindu Law’. Note by Secretary to the Government of India, Home Department, 22 February, 1939. (NAI) GOI Home Department—Judicial, F.28/13/1938. 66 Monmayee Basu, Hindu Women and Marriage Law (Oxford University Press, Delhi, 2004), pp. 127–133.

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with three proposed revisions to the amended 1938 Hindu Women’s Property Act were awaiting discussion in the central legislature.67 It was this backlog of time-consuming legislation that prompted the Government of India to form a Hindu Law Committee. Established in January 1941, the Committee was ordered to look into and resolve the complications surrounding Hindu women’s property rights in the proposed bills. After six months of consultation, the Committee concluded that it was legislators’ piecemeal approach to law reform that was the major source of legal confusion and called on the government to back a more comprehensive project to codify and reform the wider body of Hindu law68 —a Hindu answer to the Shariat Act. The Government consented to this proposal and, over the next six years, the Hindu Law Committee worked to draw up a Hindu Code Bill that was introduced to the central legislature on 11 April, 1947, only months before independence. Strong support for the Code Bill project, from legislators, but particularly from within the Nehru government,69 meant that the measure was revived soon after the transfer of power, before the new constitution had even been drawn up. With political and regional factions vying for dominance in the new nation-state, the rifts and differences regarding the direction in which Hindu law reform should proceed did not simply disappear with independence. Rather, the Code Bill was drawn into much wider debates about citizenship and the framing of constitutional rights. For Muslim representatives, independence and partition made the protection of a coherent Muslim identity and autonomy from the Hindu dominated state an even more pressing concern. As debates about Hindu law were drawn into wider discussions about state-building, Indian Muslim leaders sought assurances that their community would be allowed to follow their ‘religious’ practices,

67 Hindu Law Committee ‘Report of the Hindu Law Committee’ (June, 1941), Appendix VI. (IOR) V/26/100/16. 68 Ibid, p. 10. 69 The revival of the Hindu Code Bill after 1947 has been seen as the result of Jawaharlal Nehru and B. R. Ambedkar’s personal commitment to social reform. Lotika Sarkar, ‘Jawaharlal Nehru and the Hindu Code Bill’ in B. R. Nanda (ed.), Indian Women: from Purdah to Modernity (Vikas, New Delhi, 1990), pp. 87–98; Reba Som, ‘Jawaharlal Nehru and the Hindu Code Bill: a Victory of Symbol over Substance’, Modern Asian Studies vol. 28, no. 1, (1994), pp. 165–195; Madhu Kishwar, ‘Codified Hindu Law: Myth and reality’, Economic and Political Weekly, vol. XXIX, no. 33, (13 August, 1994), pp. 2145–2161, especially pp. 2145–2146.

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including their very recently acquired ‘traditional’ system of law.70 In agreeing to uphold the autonomy of the Muslim community the new Indian government was not creating new differences between Hindu and Muslim citizens’ relationship to civil legal structures, but were cementing a difference that had been developing for several decades prior to 1947.

Conclusion Though they were framed in secular, universal terms, the Fundamental Rights enacted as part of the 1950 Constitution, held very different appeal for Hindu and Muslim Indians. Colonial jurists’ conviction that the joint family formed the mainstay of Hindu domestic and legal life meant that the liberal language of rights employed in the constitution appealed to the interests of propertied Hindu representatives in a way that it did not to their Muslim counterparts. This is not to argue that Indian Muslims could not accept or relate to notions of individual rights or the kind of rights framework espoused by Hindu legislators. The notion of the rights-bearing individual formed the basis of colonial Muslim law. Indeed, for many influential Muslim men it was the emphasis placed on individual rights in colonial courts that was problematic. The social and economic, and from 1919 onwards, political pressures shaping late-colonial life in India meant that many Muslim reformers were interested in claims about collective identity and religious practice. This difference in the stance of Hindu and Muslim reformers towards claims about religion reflected colonial constructions of religious personal law. The more secular, universalizing language of Hindu legislators’ calls for property law reform was not the result of cultural factors—these legislators showed no sign of being more tolerant in favouring secularization than their Muslim counterparts.71 In framing their arguments in terms of religious authenticity, Muslim reformers were responding to colonial jurists’ preoccupation with 70 Jawaharlal Nehru to Mohammad Ismail Khan, Muslim League representative in the Constituent Assembly, 30 December, 1948, Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru, (2nd series), Vol. 9, S. Gopal (ed.) (Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Fund: Oxford University Press, New Delhi, circa. 1990), pp. 317–318. 71 Eleanor Newbigin, ‘The Codification of Personal Law and Secular Citizenship: Revisiting the History of Law Reform in Late Colonial India’, Indian Economic and Social History Review, vol. 46, no. 1 (2009), pp. 83–104.

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textual sources and the primacy of scriptural authority over custom. The more nebulous textual basis of the colonial Hindu legal system meant that Hindu reformers lacked recourse to similar arguments about ‘correct’ religious practice. As a result, Hindu reformers critiqued colonial accounts of social evolution and the historical development of Hindu law, arguments which necessarily drew on a more secular discursive framework. Contesting colonial narratives about the historical development of Indian society, Hindu reformers’ arguments often appeared to be sympathetic to liberal notions of individual rights. For Muslims, however, the emphasis on religious identity and legal autonomy in law reform debates was much less compatible with a liberal individualism, freed from all other ascriptive identities. Against the backdrop of constitutional reform and devolution, these discursive differences had important implications for the relationship between the state and Hindu and Muslim representatives. The more ‘secular’ basis of Hindu reformers’ claims made them more dependent on, and therefore brought them into closer alliance with, the structures of civil power and apparatus of the state. For Muslims, however, law reforms granted greater power and autonomy to extra-state authorities—to Muslim religious clerics and jurists. This division was greatly exacerbated, though not created, by the communal politics of partition, which gave Indian Hindus a large popular majority and dominance over the independent state structure. Muslim citizenship in post-colonial India has come increasingly to be defined by this tension between claims to religious autonomy and civil rights. Though the debates about personal law reform were by no means the only intellectual well-spring for Indian notions of liberal rights, it seems that they hold an important legacy for understanding the operation of citizenship in post-colonial India. Post-colonial governance has been crucial in shaping the ‘application’ and reality of the citizenship set out in the Fundamental Rights. But, in focusing too heavily on application, academics have failed to question assumptions about the supposed neutrality, or secularity, of this type of liberal citizenship. This is not to argue that the liberal-secular project was, or is, destined to fail in India. Rather it is a plea, to academics and policymakers alike, to acknowledge that 15 August, 1947 did not mark a tabula rasa in Indians’ relationship with the state, but that people’s views of and relationship to notions of citizenship were deeply shaped by pre-existing debates and social structures.

C Cambridge University Press 2010 Modern Asian Studies 45, 1 (2011) pp. 33–56.  doi:10.1017/S0026749X10000302

From Subjects to Citizens? Rationing, refugees and the publicity of corruption over Independence in UP WILLIAM GOULD School of History, University of Leeds, Leeds, LS2 9JT, UK Email: [email protected] Abstract Building on recent work on the ‘everyday state’ and citizenship in 1947–1948, this paper examines changing practices and representations of ‘corruption’ in Uttar Pradesh, India over independence. The management and publicity of ‘corruption’, particularly in the food supply and rationing bureaucracy from the mid-1940s to the 1960s captures changing discussions about public expectations of government and narrates everyday urban experiences of the local state. Representations of administrative corruption within UP government ‘anticorruption’ planning, around the late 1930s to early 1940s, reflected changing ideas about the public and citizenship in UP in general—from a colonial stress on administrative authoritarianism, where corruption was presented as a regrettable but unavoidable facet of local power, to a sense of public accountability. By the 1940s, with war-time commodity controls accompanying rapid political change, opportunities for nefarious gain widened, and administrative rules and functions quickly became much more complex. ‘Corruption’, as a symbolic political weapon, was publicized in a way which now connected national, state and local level discussions of independence, citizenship and state authority. Specifically, the very nature of different types of corruption in the crucial sphere of controls and rationing brought about more developed forms of political protection and backing for the corrupt administrator and encouraged new clientelist networks across the political spectrum.

Introduction Changing public and governmental ideas about ‘corruption’ in India, as elsewhere, have for a long time been seen as a key interpretive interface for popular local perceptions of the everyday state.1 Yet very few writers have attempted to historicize this popular perception 1 One of the groundbreaking and most thought provoking studies that sparked off a new academic interest in the phenomenon of corruption in South Asia has been Akhil

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to look at how, for example, notions of citizenship and the state in India, transformed in relation to discourses of ‘corruption’ over critical periods of governmental change, between the early 1940s and 1960s. Whenever a paper on ‘corruption’ is presented to an academic conference, or taken as a theme in a newspaper leader, there is strong tendency for writers and listeners alike to throw up their arms: What can be done or said about a phenomenon that is apparently so ubiquitous, pervasive, or politically entrenched? Unfortunately the suggestion that ‘corruption is everywhere’, or ‘inevitable’, does not help us to explain why political reactions to it have been uneven over time. Nor does it help to untangle the real ways in which ideas about permissible and non-permissible forms of public behaviour fundamentally alter, disturb or reinforce social and political hierarchies, particularly in relation to government.2 If ‘corruption’ is an inevitable product of human organization, then we are faced with the question of how far its effects can be tolerated according to the ordinary workings of an organizational rules system, such as a public administration. At what point do the inevitabilities of corrupt behaviour, really mean ‘corruption’; at what point do those outside, or more loosely linked to transactions involving rule-bending, begin to label and critique such activities? Furthermore, if most are agreed that corruption is ‘inevitable’, the real issue is one not of ending corruption, but one of how far mechanisms for controlling or regulating it are effective.3 These questions are particularly urgent in relation to everyday forms of interaction between state

Gupta’s, ‘Blurred Boundaries: The Discourse of Corruption, the Culture of Politics, and the Imagined State’, American Ethnologist, Vol. 22, No. 2 (May 1995), pp. 375–402; also significant in pushing this kind of study forward is Jonathan Parry, ‘“The Crisis of Corruption” and “The Idea of India”: A Worm’s Eye View’ in I. Pardo (ed.), The Morals of Legitimacy (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2000), pp. 27–55. 2 The ways in which corruption is bound up in the production of class, religious and gender inequalities has been looked at for contemporary India by Craig Jeffrey, Barbara Harriss-White and Stuart Corbridge. In this work, it appears that corruption can become a deliberate choice, made to further particular sectional interests. Craig Jeffrey, ‘“A Fist is Stronger than Five Fingers”: Caste and Dominance in Rural North India’ Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, vol. 25, no. 2 (2001), pp. 1– 30; Barbara Harriss-White, India Working: Essays on Society and Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 72–103, 239–247; S. Corbridge and S. Kumar, ‘Community, Corruption, Landscape: Tales from the Tee Trade’, Political Geography vol. 21 no. 6 (2002), pp. 765–788. 3 Vincent Fitzsimons, ‘The institutional structure of corruption: firm competition and the choice of institutional strategy’, Paper presented at Institute for Development Policy and Management and Global Poverty Research Group conference, University of Manchester, UK, Friday 25 November, 2005.

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and citizen—perhaps the realm of ‘petty corruption’—since, on the one hand, most Indian citizens experience the state through lower level government servants, and on the other, representations of corruption are consumed through organs of popular culture and dissemination. The relationships between big business and powerful financial interests and government agencies are an important part of these representations (and easily identified everywhere),4 but much less is known of how general views of government corruption percolate down to the street. Building on recent work on the ambiguous nature of the ‘everyday state’ and citizenship in 1947–1948,5 this paper will examine changing practices and representations of ‘corruption’ in Uttar Pradesh (UP), India, over independence, and look at how they affected notions of citizenship. It will look at the management and publicity of ‘corruption’, particularly in the food supply and rationing bureaucracy from the mid-1940s to the 1960s. The latter captures changing discussions about public expectations of government and narrates everyday urban experiences of the local state. In particular, the aim is to examine how the management and publicity of corruption was an essential outgrowth of very specific pressures of colonial transition. The first argument will be that there was a significant shift in representations of administrative corruption within UP government ‘anti-corruption’ planning around the late 1930s to early 1940s, which introduced a new sense of public accountability and responsibility for corruption control. This partly reflected changing ideas about the public and citizenship in UP in general—from a colonial stress on administrative authoritarianism, where corruption was presented as a regrettable but unavoidable facet of local power, to a sense of 4 For more discussion of this level of ‘corruption’, see Gurharpal Singh, ‘Corruption in Contemporary Indian Politics’, in Paul Heywood (ed.), Political Corruption (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), pp. 210–222. 5 The most complete range of discussions of this idea can be found in C. J. Fuller and V. Bénéï (eds), The Everyday State and Society in Modern India (London: C. Hurst and Co., 2001), and René Véron, Stuart Corbridge, Glyn Williams, Manoj Srivastava, ‘The Everyday State and Political Society in Eastern India: Structuring Access to the Employment Assurance Scheme’, The Journal of Development Studies, Vol. 39, No. 5, (June 2003), pp. 1–28. More recently, interest has grown in the ambiguities too, surrounding the idea of citizenship in relation to the late 1940s and early 1950s. Here, I refer particularly to the work of Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar (footnote 7), Joya Chatterji (footnote 55), Paul Brass and Partha Chatterjee—the latter in relation to contemporary India and discussions surrounding the politics of the dispossessed; Paul Brass, The Politics of Northern India: 1937 to 2007 (forthcoming, 2011); Partha Chatterjee, The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004).

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public accountability. At a basic level this was about the changing sense of culpability of the bribe-giver, compared with the bribetaker. Whereas in both phases, the contacts between local power brokers and the local state were seen as inevitably leading to ‘corrupt’ transactions, for administrators of the earlier phase this could be tolerated to some extent by representing such transactions as ‘customary’. By the late 1940s and 1950s, governments elected on a popular, albeit limited mandate, began to envisage administrative corruption in terms of the practices of the colonial past. Citizens’ organizations were promoted by local governments and by dissatisfied or dispossessed subjects/citizens as a bulwark against what they saw as the inherited tendencies of police and administrative excess; anticorruption ‘committees’ were established, and the press became a new kind of public mouthpiece for the exposure of scandals. By the 1940s, too, with war time commodity controls accompanying rapid political change, opportunities for nefarious gain widened, and administrative rules and functions quickly became much more complex. ‘Corruption’, as a symbolic political weapon, was publicized in a way which now connected national, state and local level discussions of independence, citizenship and state authority. The changing meanings surrounding corruption cannot, however, simply be explained by the rhetoric of newly independent democratic states regarding governmental accountability. More significant were the specific reactions to local state structures that colonialism in UP enabled, as ambiguous layers of local state power where the nexus of authority and influence was uncertain. The combination of these factors—the specific pressures of the 1940s political transitions, and the on-going but now more complicated pockets of colonial administrative fiefdoms—eventually allowed ‘corruption’ to become a normalized part of everyday approaches to the state in the midtwentieth century. Specifically, we will look at how the very nature of different types of corruption in the crucial sphere of controls and rationing brought about more developed forms of political protection and backing for the corrupt administrator—in particular, new types of clientelist networks in supplies and rationing which, in turn, encouraged new kinds of administrative/political networks, as shown by Kochanek for the 1960s.6 6 Stanley Kochanek, Business and Politics in India (New York: University of California Press, 1974), pp. 214–239; Stanley Kochanek, The Congress Party of India: the Dynamics of One-Party Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968).

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The final section will look at how the dynamic meanings and publicity of corruption were complicated by ambiguities surrounding citizenship and citizen rights in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Full rights of citizenship were not guaranteed in the period of transition, particularly for those suspected of holding links with Pakistan, but also in an informal sense for a wide range of other dispossessed subject-citizens.7 Shifting representations and practices of corruption over the mid-1940s and 1950s were critical in defining and redefining the permissible rights and responsibilities of such quasi-citizens on the one hand, and officers that came into contact with them on the other. Corruption became a discourse for representing the injustices and disqualifications of a range of communities pushed to the periphery of India’s dominant national narrative, be they displaced refugees or urban poor. But also, from the point of view of governments, the policing and control of the dispossessed created the notion of social chaos, around which the idea of local corruption could be naturalised. Here, too, the issue of licenses for commodities and rations in the transitional years of the Second World War was crucial. In connecting these three areas of argument—changing state representation, practices of corruption, and implications for the rights of ‘citizens’—it becomes clear that there was a duality in thinking about corruption among officialdom and in popular political discourse over the late 1940s and 1950s. This included a broad sense of its colonial roots, but also a kind of recognition that at a quotidian level it was something not easily reformed. This was because the very mechanisms of corruption allowed politicians, by the early 1950s, to protect themselves and their interests at lower levels of the state. In other words, there was a gulf between the upper level notion of how corruption related to colonial practices, and a developing use by political leaders of bureaucratic structures for their own careers and financial interests. But as we will see in the final section of the paper, this too was affected by the peculiar circumstances of post partition migration and the citizenship rights of Muslim minorities in UP.

7 For a richly researched and original account of this situation in the immediate aftermath of India’s independence, see Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar, The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia: Refugees, Boundaries, Histories (Columbia: Columbia University Press, 2007).

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The changing publicity of ‘corruption’ In 1938, the Congress government in UP, elected under the new rules of the 1935 Government of India Act, decided (following the resolution of Bishambhar Dayal Tripathi) to set up a committee to report on measures which would counter corruption within government services. The timing and scope of this report were significant. It was the first major official provincial-level effort to investigate, define and publicly expose corruption, before the Santhanam Committee of 1964. It was also the product of a unique situation—a popular government in waiting, still operating in a colonial context. In this sense, it appeared on the cusp of changing official attitudes towards administrative responsibility in relation to what the government saw as the UP public. The 1938 report did indeed devise recommendations which presaged a changed view of public responsibility in relation to government, when compared with the phase of dyarchy in the 1920s. Its recommendations included the establishment of local anti-corruption committees involving non-officials as well as officials; measures to ease the process of prosecution of charged officials in the courts—most controversially, requesting that the standard of proof on corruption cases be lowered; and a raft of more minor suggestions, such as a petition of complaints boxes in offices—a measure that was generally thought to be ‘too corruptible’ to work.8 Although the 1938 report-writers, nodding to colonial ideas of esprit de corps, acknowledged that administrative corruption was ‘far less prevalent among gazetted officers than among the non-gazetted of clerical or menial staffs’, this new emphasis on corruption brought with it a serious commitment to public interaction in attempting to overcome or manage the problem. In this sense, the setting up of anti-corruption committees, with representatives from different walks of life, was a key proposal. The causes of corruption set out by the report also reflected this set of priorities. They included: the reluctance of the bribe giver, who has received his quid pro quo, to give evidence against the receiver; the comparative absence of a strong public opinion, especially against minor forms of corruption; the difficulty of securing adequate evidence of definite charges, partly through fear of consequences from the 8 ‘Government of the United Provinces, General Administration Department, 11 May, 1938, Notification, Report of the Anti-Corruption Committee’, Uttar Pradesh State Archives (hereafter UPSA), General Administration Department (hereafter GAD), Box 594, File 70/1938, Pt. III of file.

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officer concerned and his external political sympathizers; and the existence of a large number of poorly-paid persons in the lower ranks of government service.9 The last two of these points captured changing government approaches to corruption, and its centrality to public notions of citizenship and public responsibility. Firstly, the issue of retribution and ‘sympathizers’ linked to corrupt officers, described corruption as a complex network, involving a web of beneficiaries, many of whom might be linked to the officer around a range of different political, familial or business functions. Secondly, the mention of large numbers of poorly paid persons in government service pointed to the emerging problem of a huge, burgeoning state in which a good proportion of Indian families either had a direct connection through a family member, or aspired to have such a connection. From the early 1940s, the effects of the colonial war economy on UP society and the local state changed the nature of publicity surrounding corruption again. This was not just the product of either official committees, as in 1938, or even new political freedoms although looking at the English and Hindi press over the period, a sense of political change was important. Of perhaps equal significance were the series of crises of the 1940s, the effects of the war on UP society (and the economic controls that went with it), in weakening the legitimacy and working of the state at all levels, and in creating uncertainty and opportunity in a phase of political flux. The central administrative function here surrounded rationing and licenses. This local state activity directly involved large sections of the UP population, at least in urban areas, via the town and district level supply and rationing officers who operated the Food and Civil Supply policies of the UP government between 1942 and the 1960s. By the end of 1946, there were 49 rationed towns in UP, with a total population of 56 lakhs, and a further 340 smaller towns with a population of 23 lakhs were being considered for rationing.10 In its early stages in 1942–1943, in response to price increases, the food provisioning and rationing schemes, contained in the United Provinces Food grains Control Order 1943 aimed to keep food prices at a controlled level, and to support only the poorer 40 per cent of the urban population. The Food grains

9 ‘Report of the Anti-Corruption Committee’, UPSA, GAD, Box 594, File 70/1938, Pt. III of file. 10 ‘UP Foodgrains Provisioning Order’, UPSA, Food and Civil Supply, Box 40, File 167/1946.

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Control Order was accompanied by a whole host of other enactments for other commodities and orders controlling movement of goods.11 These were not statutory controls on prices, but an attempt to keep prices down by issuing licenses to specific dealers and controlling movement of commodities. The control policy was severely constrained by the inability of the colonial state to monitor and control trade with its limited resources. From the outset, formal total rationing was ruled out, since it was believed that large sections of the population would continue to bypass it by buying direct from the countryside. Rationing and controls were therefore concentrated in the so-called ‘regulated large towns’ of the province—Lucknow, Kanpur, Allahabad, Benares and Agra, and 20 other big towns, while subsidiary schemes were set up in a further 39 towns. The idea was to slightly undersell the open market, to bring down prices. Nevertheless, it was still recognized from the outset that if controls were in violent opposition to economic forces, it would lead to abuses, black-marketing, and hoarding, again, leading to a lack of confidence. Such abuses were almost immediately recognized, even by officialdom, in the three most significant towns— Allahabad, Kanpur and Lucknow, as well as in Eastern UP generally, where there were sharp increases in prices during 1943, despite the control policies. With India’s political future uncertain in the mid-1940s, spiralling violence, and lack of manpower to run the byzantine food control bureaucracy, Food and Civil Supply was therefore easily open to abuse. Both policy-making and administration of Food and Civil Supply necessitated constant contacts between the local administration and the public at large, in a way that remained remarkably consistent during the move towards independence.12 In 1942–1943, district magistrates were asked to set up advisory committees in every large town with representatives of various interests. They were to gather 11 ‘Foodgrains CO, 1943’; ‘Flour, Rice and Dal Mills CO 1943’; ‘Foodgrains (Movement) CO, 1943’; ‘Foodgrains Supplementary (Movement) CO, 1943’; ‘Poultry (Movement) CO, 1943’; ‘Sheep, Goats and Pigs (Movement) CO, 1943’; ‘Ghee (Movement) CO, 1944’; ‘Fish (Movement) CO, 1944’; ‘Fruit CO, 1944’; ‘Vegetable (Movement) CO, 1944’; ‘Cattle, Sheep and Goats (Slaughter) CO, 1943’; ‘Regulation of Local Purchase CO, 1944’; ‘Gur CO, 1943’; ‘Food grains Distribution Order, 1943’; ‘Starch Manufacturing CO, 1943’; ‘Restriction of Food grains Purchase Order, 1944’. 12 For a general discussion of changes in the popular perceptions of state power in India as a whole, see Sudipta Kaviraj, ‘On State, Society and Discourse in India’ in James Manor (ed.), Rethinking Third World Politics (London: Longman, 1991), pp. 72–99.

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public opinion together against abuses, evasions, and hoarding and to remain aloof from party politics—something which turned out to be an extremely naïve hope. The UP government was throughout the period of controls fighting a losing battle in some obvious areas, for example the selling off of poor-quality grain: ‘In the hurry of early buying, we seem to have bought a good deal of earth’, wrote one official commentator about the mid-1940s food policy.13 Other basic overarching abuses of the rationing system were more serious. Rationing was organized through the distribution of identity cards. In 1944, one officer in Kanpur reported that industrial workers took advantage of the ignorance and lack of resources of the management and secured rations for a large number of imaginary units and a large number of persons got rations on several different cards for the same person. One of the Town Rationing Officers for Kanpur in 1944 pointed out that ‘figures of population for Cawnpore went up from the 1941 census figure of 4,41,000 to over 8,00,000’.14 A similar case of fictitious ration cards prepared by rationing staff were unearthed elsewhere too, for example, in Etawah.15 The civic guards used to police the queues were reported, in Gorakhpur, to be seizing the opportunity to make extra money.16 And the movement of goods provided rich pickings for policemen, of course, who around Bara Banki extorted regular levies on cartmen transporting grain.17 Because controls and rationing involved such a large section of the population,18 and were so emotive (being related for example to the issue of refugees and to the problems of price rises), they connected nearly all levels of governance and political activity in urban areas. Some prominent UP Congress leaders were drawn into it: P. D. Tandon was involved at high levels in the advocacy of Hindu 13 ‘Commissioner’s Conference at Government House to discuss the supply situation’ UPSA, Food and Civil Supply, Box 37, File 974/43. 14 ‘Note AGS, 3 August, 1944’, ‘Supply of Food grains to Ordnance depots’, UPSA, Food and Civil Supply, Box 36, File 178/48. 15 ‘One more rationing employee suspended’, The National Herald (Lucknow), 7 January, 1948. 16 ‘Inspection note of Commissioner, Gorakhpur Division, 29 January, 1944’. UPSA, Food and Civil Supply, Box 37, File 974/43, ‘Commissioner’s Conference at Government House to discuss the supply situation’. 17 ‘Alleged extortion from cartmen’, The National Herald (Lucknow), 13 January, 1948, p. 4. 18 See also ‘Food grains Decontrol’, The National Herald (Lucknow), 9 January, 1948, p.4. This leading article discussed the question of an acceptable minimum wage at which a working family should be allowed to continue to receive ration cards after de-rationing.

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Sindhi complaints against Muslim rationing officers at local levels. One of the first UP Food and Civil Supplies Ministers, C. B. Gupta, was embroiled in corruption scandals which linked high-level business deals with the complaints of men and women on the UP streets. The issue was a central one for all governments. For the period 1949– 1951, the procurement and rationing of food grains was costing the UP Government the huge sum of about Rs. 2 crores every year and public debates were common around the issue of whether production could be best enhanced under a policy of control or decontrol.19 Nehru considered the food situation, and the corruption associated with it, to be a general problem of grave proportions that linked in his mind to problems of law and order—creating a ‘spectre of famine and starvation’.20 While touring UP in early February 1952 he found that people in Allahabad ‘generally were against the Sarpanchas and the Mukhias who, it was said, did not distribute the cloth properly and made money out of black-marketing’.21 The rationing/trade licensing of food, cloth and building materials involved controversies that reached from the state government down into the locality. And it was in this area that the publicity surrounding corruption linked UP’s urban poor and middle classes to higher levels of governance. As will be seen in more detail below, this meant that proactive citizens’ organizations emerged to expose examples of local corruption surrounding rationing and supply. These organizations used the local press and the mechanisms of the local state itself in their attempts to expose officers’ corruption. Unlike the late 1930s where critiques of police and administrative corruption, where publicized, were generally linked to specific anti-colonial movements and campaigns, by the early period of post-independence UP, corruption was now more widely discussed. Moreover, specific cases against individual officers were rooted out, publicized and disseminated more widely. The press was freer after the war, and citizens’ expectations were also clearly higher. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, administrative corruption was discussed in terms of older structures of power that ought to be reformed by a ‘modernizing’ state. However, as will be seen below, the new public critiques of corruption also

19 See for example, ‘Who Gains from Cloth Decontrol?’ Magazine section, National Herald, 11 April, 1948, p. 2. 20 Jawaharlal Nehru to Pant, 13/4/51, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (hereafter NMML) Pant Papers, reel 1. 21 Jawaharlal Nehru to Pant, 8/2/1952, NMML, ‘Secret Note’, Pant Papers, reel 1.

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became part of a complex mechanism of political protection of officers and local leaders themselves exposed to corruption scandals, and were used as a means of exposing rivals.

The politics of corruption and anti-corruption in the supply offices A central focus of corruption scandals and complaints over the 1940s and early 1950s was the peculiar structure of the food and civil supply machinery, and in particular, the new hierarchy of administrative officers set up to administer the controls. These were headed by the District Magistrate, and a Regional Food Controller, and most importantly, involved the recruitment of temporary gazetted officers—Town Rationing Officers, Area Rationing Officers and District Supply Officers (hereafter ‘TRO’, ‘ARO’ and ‘DSO’). These administrators formed an important although ambiguous link between local administration of controls and public outrage surrounding it, and were at the heart of a complex range of controversies and clientelist networks across UP over the late 1940s and 1950s. DSOs and TROs received special rates of pay of Rs. 300, comparable with the India Career Services which at the time generally started at Rs. 350.22 These officers were vulnerable, being constantly exposed to public controversy because their posts were temporary (and hence they did not have the same statutory protection as permanent civil servants). However, they also had significant local power. Licenses of dealers in controlled food grains could be suspended, pending complaints against them as reported by rationing inspectors. It was pointed out in 1946 that, ‘such a practice will encourage corruption on the part of the Inspectors as the suspension of a licence is a life and death question for a dealer. Such cases when contested in the regular court require about six months time to be decided. During this long period the entire business of a dealer is ruined and stocks get spoiled. . .’.23 Indeed, the courts were often irrelevant to the powers of these officers. Under the UP Food Grains Control Order, 1945, the licensing authority could suspend or cancel licenses, irrespective of 22

Interview with R. K. Trivedi (Lucknow), 18 March, 2008. ‘Hony Secretary of Beopar Mandal, Chowk Bazar, Dehra Dun, 3 October, 1946 to Commissioner for Rationing and Civil Supplies, UP, Lucknow’. ‘Food grains Control Order’, UPSA, Food and Civil Supply, Box 34, File 135/43. 23

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a court’s decision.24 The possibilities for additional remuneration for these officers were also vast. And partly because of this, there were several court cases in which the UP government had to defend against accusations of vindictive license cancellations and the like.25 Most importantly, the TROs and DSOs from this period were nearly all immersed in some form of local factional network involving political, familial or business links, some going back generations. Such networks often financed local power bases of politicians by the early 1950s. In the first two weeks of November 1951, C. B. Gupta, the UP Food and Civil Supplies Minister, was accused of distributing ration shops and licenses to supporters in different towns, and handing out coal and fuel licenses to Congress sympathizers. Gupta nicely summed up the political intricacies of Food and Supply in a defensive letter to Nehru: Unfortunately I was entrusted with some of the most ticklish and difficult portfolios like Food and Civil Supplies much against my will. But I can assert that I have seldom exercised my discretion in matters where powers of patronage could be used. It should be remembered that the number of licensees for various commodities in the Uttar Pradesh will be probably over two lakhs and the number of applicants who want this or that permit will run into several times that number. There must be hundreds of Congressmen who could be holding this or that permit but the accusers seem to have taken special pleasure in picking out a few Congressmen who are not associated with their group in the Congress, even though these persons have obtained their licenses through the normal channel.26

Because of this kind of pressure from the top, or in order to maintain political protection for their own gain, DSOs and TROs sought out new income. Some benefitted from their clients’ black market activities. B. R. Sharma, DSO at Banaras in the mid-1950s, was allegedly involved in the appointment of favoured contractors, through networks

24 ‘Office Memorandum, J. D. Banks (For Commissioner) to Hony Secretary, Beopar Mandal, Dehra Dun’, Ibid. 25 For example, ‘In the Court of Civil Judge, Aligarh. Pauper Suit no. 11 of 1956. Radha Kishan s/o Jai Narain, partner of Firm Radha-Kishan Sannamal, a present residing in Lachmi Narayan Temple Daughali, Goberdhan District Mathura— Plaintiff Versus 1. The State of Uttar Pradesh, summons to be served on Secretary to Ministry of Food and Civil Supplies, Uttar Pradesh, Luknow. 2. Shri Bhaskar Rao Sharma, at present District Supply Officer, Kanpur’ in Personal file of B.R. Sharma, UPSA, Food and Civil Supply, Box 6, file 155/44. 26 C. B. Gupta to Jawaharlal Nehru, forwarded to Pant, 11 November, 1951, Pant Papers, reel 1, NMML.

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of subordinates.27 A petition signed from ‘the people of Gorakhpur’ claimed that Syed Ahmed, TRO/DSO of Basti, and later Gorakhpur, only granted licenses to powerful groups linked to his family, and ignored aam log.28 Significant here were the accusations of communal or caste bias—something which had a special kind of purchase both just before and after independence. The complaints against K. S. Sirohi, TRO of Budaun, included his apparent appointment of coreligionists and lackeys into subordinate posts and the granting of licenses to particular Sikh families, which contributed to his deep involvement in the management of black market profiteering, especially in construction.29 In many cases, there were accusations of party or factional favour in the granting of licenses. For example, in the file of the Lucknow Area Rationing Officer in 1948–1949, R. S. Jouhri, the character roll contained the very common type of statement—that, ‘His aptitude for intrigue and tendency to mix up in local politics prevent him from being as useful as he could be . . . there were certain complaints but nothing was substantiated as they were due to intrigues of local parties’.30 Clearly, as was the case with the long and chequered career of the K. B. Misra, who worked as ARO across UP but was constantly seen in Lucknow mobilizing MLA31 supporters, officers needed to have powerful political and business links in each locality, and such connections helped them in times of personal career crisis and public scandals.32 These officers were therefore immersed in their own kinds of clientelist networks. And this was something which citizens’ organizations were often set up to combat. For example, a resolution urging the Banaras authorities to take drastic steps to eradicate corruption from government offices entrusted with the distribution of goods in the city was passed at a ‘meeting of residents’ on 4 January, 1948. The resolution asked local MLAs not to bring pressure to bear 27 G. N. Tiwari, Ex AFGI, Allahabad, June 1954. Personal file of B. R. Sharma, UPSA, Food and Civil Supply, Box 6, file 155/44. 28 ‘Members of DSO staff—complaint’ 14 May, 1955, ‘Personal File of Sri Syed Ahmed’, UPSA, Food and Civil Supply, Box 21, File 791/45. 29 R. p. Nautiyal, MLA Garhwal to C. B. Gupta, Minister for Food and Civil Supplies, 3 May, 1954, ‘Personal file of K. S. Sirohi’, UPSA, Food and Civil Supply, Box 12, File 864/45. 30 ‘Representation regarding R. S. Jouhri character roll, personal file’, UPSA, Food and Civil Supply, Box 14, File 839(P)/45. 31 Member of the Legislative Assembly (India). 32 See ‘Personal File of Sri K. B. Misra, ARO’, UPSA, Food and Civil Supply, Box 21, File 790/45.

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upon the Government and officials to suppress cases of corruption.33 However, with the right kind of political support or cover, the bungling of procedures or rules became much easier. Very common was the acquiescence in rule breaking and creative accounting, for a cut (or ambiguous bribe). B. R. Sharma, a DSO already transferred to Allahabad for bad behaviour, profited in this way from one Sri Kesari Narain—a rationed retailer of Bharti Bhawan area. The latter allegedly misappropriated food grains up to 90 maunds by making entries on bogus ration cards and wrong (farzi) additions in the sales register. The case against the dealer was then sent to Sharma who, according to one witness, accepted a bribe of Rs. 1,000. Karan Singh Sirohi, while in Budaun in the early 1950s, allegedly used his rationing inspector in an elaborate scheme to collect bribes from licensees.34 The UP newspapers were full of similar cases throughout the late 1940s and early 1950s, and the files themselves show how the interjection of local power brokers allowed such misdemeanours to be overlooked by departmental enquiries. One activity which easily evaded complaint mechanisms and public censure due to high level political protection, was ‘partibandi’, or the dividing up of ill-gotten gains by the staff of supply offices. In 1950– 1951, the supply office at Allahabad was the scene of an intricate, longterm embezzlement of infamous proportions, involving 18 officers, godown inspectors and dozens of outsiders, including MLAs and local party bosses. In total, Rs. 18,361 was misappropriated or embezzled and took nearly two years to fully unearth.35 Political protection, financed by racketeers was also evident in Aligarh. In the file of Saraswati Prasad, it was noted that one contact had been making tons of money by securing permits for sugar, steel and cement etc. from the District Supply Officer of Aligarh, and selling them in the black market. The local police and the present Distt. Supply Officer are openly in collusion with the said Goonda . . . and anybody can see him near the DSO’s 33 ‘MLAs asked not to frustrate Anti-Corruption Activity in Banaras’, The National Herald (Lucknow), 7 January, 1948, p. 8. 34 ‘Complaint against Sri Karan Singh Sirohi, DSO/TRO Budaun’, 1/10/51, ‘Personal file of K. S. Sirohi’, UPSA, Food and Civil Supply, Box 12, File 864/45. 35 Extract from Food and Civil Supply (C) Deptt. File no. 1140/1951 reg. Embezzlement in Town Rationing Office (Issues) Allahabad, Shyam Bahadur Singh Visen DSO/TRO (personal file of), UPSA, Food and Civil Supply, Box 24, file 619/49. ‘Report of inspection on the quantity accounts of the office of the Dy Town Rationing Officer (Issue), Allahabad for the period from April 1, 1950 to December 31, 1951’ ‘Embezzlement in TRO Office, Allahabad’, UPSA, Rent Control C, Box 2, file 1140/1951.

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office everyday, obtaining permits on bogus names, and funnily he enjoys the patronage and support of Mr N. S. Chowhan MP.36

The controversies surrounding supply, controls and rationing affected in a broad way, both the publicity surrounding corruption itself and popular discourses about the relationship between administrator and Indian ‘citizen’. In the face of potentially vindictive supply officers, those approaching the supply machinery sought to protect their interests informally. So in a very real sense, expectations surrounding administrative corruption involved the UP urban public in quite new ways from those of the 1940s. Twenty-four thick personnel files chart the careers of individual TROs and DROs in the Food and Civil Supplies Department in UP, and in all of them there were at least a few accusations against the officer’s integrity. In fourteen files, the accusations and investigations are complex and take up most of the file. The work of DROs and TROs was naturally vulnerable to general public complaint and the ire of public lobby groups, usually couched in the new language of ‘public service’ and citizenship. This powerful anti-corruption discourse, as Jeffrey has shown for contemporary West UP, mobilised the Nehruvian and colonial ideal of the ‘servant state’. For example, Makhan Lal Sharma complained about the DSO of Banaras to K. M. Munshi, the Governor of Uttar Pradesh, on 24 July, 1952, through the Collector of Saharanpur. He had applied in 1950 for permits for Iron sheets and barbed wire to the District Supply Officer and was told that stocks were not available, but had seen that others had managed to get them. He claimed he had been harassed by Sharma, who, he complained, ‘had no right to do so with me when I am a citizen of Free India and got independence after endurance for years and years undergoing many cruelties of the British Govt. from time to time’.37 Gopinath Singh, MP, Hariharnath Shastri Memorial Committee, wrote to Sampurnanand about Sharma on 19 April, 1956: ‘. . . it appears to me that the present District Supply Officer in Kanpur lacks the sense of courtesy that the members of the public have a legitimate right to expect from a public servant of his rank in a popular and democratic regime. . .’. Before 1947, most of these officers, coming from the deputy collector level of the

36 Kanhaiya Lal Sharma, Rajkiya Press Mazdoor Sangh to G. B. Pant, 30 January, 1961, in ‘Sri Saraswati Prasad, personal file’, UPSA, FCS, Box 13, File 960/45. 37 Makhan Lal Sharma to Sri K. M. Munshi, Governor, Uttar Pradesh, 24 July, 1952, Personal file of B. R. Sharma, UPSA, Food and Civil Supply, Box 6, file 155/44.

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services, were Indians. But Britons were also among those accused. For example, one Major C. J. O. Bradley was prosecuted in a bribery case surrounding house allotment in Lucknow.38 The common expectation in these complaints that the Indian citizen could expect ‘public service’ from this part of the bureaucracy, was one that self-consciously connected notions of bureaucratic disregard for civic rights, to colonial times. In a number of UP towns, general complaints asserting the new democratic rights of the people against colonial-style local autocracies came from self-proclaimed citizens’ organizations. A letter from ‘the residents of Agra’ in August 1950, about the attitude of Hiranand Jhangiani, TRO, stated that he was objectionable and annoying. He had created terror in business circles, bringing business to a standstill. ‘He does not think himself to be a public servant. He has no courtesy for the public. He has the mentality of old type of Britishers’.39 ‘The citizens of Ballia’ used a spokesperson to represent against the allegedly nepotistic activities of the DSO there, Shyam Swaroop Tandon, who purportedly helped family members to obtain all manner of permits. The complaint read that, The present DSO. . .is so filthy in his talks and so rude in his behaviour with the public that we have become sick of him. In addition to all these he is thoroughly corrupt and has polluted the whole atmosphere here. The sooner he is shunted off from this place the better for the public of Ballia. The present District Magistrate perhaps hails from the same place as the DSO and this has made him all the more emboldened. . . and hence he thinks that nobody can harm him.40

Clear in these complaints was the shift from emphasis on ‘good family’ as a qualification for public service, to a more general notion of citizenship. S. S. Tandon’s recommendations for service in 1936, described him as coming from ‘a very respectable and loyal Tandon family of Etawah. . .’. By 1960, he was being targeted by the Faizabad

38 Petition of R. S. Jouhri to G. B. Pant, 1948 in ‘Representation regarding R. S. Jouhri character roll, personal file’, UPSA, Food and Civil Supply, Box 14, File 839(P)/45. 39 Residents of Agra to Minister for Food and Civil Supply, 27 August, 1950, in ‘Sri H. G. Jhangiani ASO Agra (Personal File)’ UPSA, Food and Civil Supply Box 24, File 629/49. 40 Murli Manohar to Ali Zahir Saheb, 6 November, 1957, ‘Sri S. S. Tandon, personal file of’ UPSA, Food and Civil Supply, Box 5, file 141/44.

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Zila Congress organization as nepotistic and profiteering, in collusion with a particular Tandon family in Akbarpur.41 Quite a lot of the reporting in the press was born of frustration with the inadequacies of the supply machinery itself. As the District Magistrate of Agra reported in 1959, in defence of the Supply Office, ‘People requiring a major share have to go back disappointed as small issues do not satisfy their needs. These people have to satisfy themselves through press reports’.42 This meant that DSOs and TROs had to be masters of publicity management themselves. In Moradabad in 1959, Karan Singh Sirohi, TRO, was faced with a virulent smear campaign in the weekly Parvatiya, leading him to propose legal action against the editor. An apologetic letter later appeared in the paper, which satisfied the TRO. It then transpired that Sirohi had privately concluded an agreement with the editor who, the District Magistrate felt, probably had some information against him. One note on this file pointed out that some other officers had been actually paying small fees to the editor of the paper, to protect their reputation.43 Then, when in the late 1950s, Sirohi was called to answer departmental charges against him, he once again used the press to protect his reputation, by favouring another editor.44 The DM of Azamgarh pointed out that, ‘Sri Sirohi has quoted one single cutting, which refers to his popularity. I know the particular correspondent who sent it and he might have been pleased with Sri Sirohi at a particular time because of some particular favour.’45 By 1948 at the latest, rationing and supplies had become bywords for corruption and black marketeering in UP. And it was well understood that this was by no means a clear cut case of public victimization, but that such forms of corruption were so creative, precisely because they highlighted the ambiguous nature of the local state in relation to citizen lobbies, refugees, business interests and

41 Reference note of Hari Shanker Civil Judge, Etawah, 21 December, 1936 and Vice President DCC, Raj Bahadur Sinh, Zila Congress Pres, Faizabad, D. Sharma and three others, to Minister for Civil Supplies, Uttar Pradesh, 30 November, 1960. Ibid. 42 Margin note on letter—Satya Prakash Gupta to the Commissioner, Agra Division, 17 October, 1959. ‘Sri Saraswati Prasad, personal file’, UPSA, Food and Civil Supply, Box 13, File 960/45. 43 D.O. No. 38/ST-59 (DSO), 30/3/59, ‘Personal file of K. S. Sirohi’, UPSA, Food and Civil Supply, Box 12, File 864/45. 44 K. N. Srivastava, DM Azamgarh to G. p. Pandey, Additional Secretary to Government, 22 May, 1957, ibid. 45 Ibid.

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political organizations. This was an area in which local reputation and political capital could be manipulated through the press, especially when larger corruption scandals regarding supplies were regular fodder for the hack, such as the Kanpur Municipal Board cement misappropriation scandal of January 1948.46 It is possible to see this in detailed practice in many of the TRO files: how officers and those accusing them of corruption used the idea of public opinion and public disgrace, to highlight irregularities in administration, or to generate political capital. In particular, the discourses of corruption were tied up to other notions of public morality. B. R Sharma, for example, at Allahabad was ‘. . . being talked [about] on the street[s] of Allahabad and everyone is amazed to see how such debauched, dishonest and corrupt officers are retained in the department’.47 In this politics of corruption and anti-corruption surrounding civil supply the TRO/DRO had to become a master of publicity, as well as a figure who could manoeuvre between an array of political interest groups in the city or district.

Corruption, citizenship and the Muslim government servant In the aftermath of partition and the controversies surrounding evacuee properties, notions of corruption interacted too with charges of ‘communalism’ in the press. Following the assassination of Gandhi at the end of January 1948, the RSS was banned and any accusation of involvement in a communal controversy over the 1940s could be potentially damaging for career politicians. This extended to Muslim leaders and officers too, although here the implications were different. In the first years following partition, the issue of Muslim ‘loyalty’, particularly within the civil services, became a means of defining the rights and responsibilities of Indian citizens in relation to Pakistan, particularly in areas like UP. As such, where allegations of ‘communal bias’ were directed against Muslim officers, the implications went beyond simply involvement in controversy in India. A whole range of anti-corruption moves against Muslim TROs and DROs, made 46 ‘Inquiry into Cement Misappropriation’ The National Herald (Lucknow), 6 January, 1948, p. 6. 47 A Rationing Employee to Sri C. B. Gupta, 5/1/54, Minister for Food and Civil Supplies, UP, Lucknow Personal file of B. R. Sharma, UPSA, Food and Civil Supply, Box 6, file 155/44.

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reflections on how their actions for personal gain also threw doubt over their loyalty to the state: corruption was easily associated with the idea of Pakistan, particularly where claims were made about the basic provision of housing, and controlled items to co-religionists. The ‘potentially untrustworthy’ Muslim officer was an easy target. Syed Ahmed, TRO/DSO of Basti and later Gorakhpur, was hounded through a Hindi press campaign by his own staff who complained, among other things, about his alleged Muslim bias, and his supposed sexual advances towards Hindu and Christian girls.48 The complaints against another DSO of Kanpur in the early 1950s, Nawab Syed Mohammad Hasad Khan Nawab, were spearheaded by the local Congress organizations. Khan allegedly lived a luxurious life with two wives and two first class motor cars for his pleasure trips, and, according to the complainant, was not just a ‘Nawab’ but a ‘double Nawab’. He was described as ‘a communal minded officer’, of ‘League mentality’. His lifestyle, the complainant argued, was maintained by the organization of bribes and black market activities through one of his Muslim inspection officers. He allegedly used his driver as a middleman for illegal exactions from petty illiterate dealers. When this corruption was about to be exposed, the DSO managed to send the driver to Pakistan.49 The Hindi press image of the UP Muslim, especially civil servant and policeman, as potential evacuee and ‘Pakistan sympathiser’ was important here. In some cases, the failures of particular departments were blamed on Muslim evacuees— this was the case in the supply office in Allahabad, during the huge embezzlement scandal of 1948–1952, where a Muslim TRO had migrated.50 And in the ‘efficiency drive’ of the early 1950s, supposed links to Pakistan were used in other departments as a pretext for rooting out useless officers. Mohammad Mobin Khan, a Kanungo of Mainpuri, was alleged to be in illegal possession of the Sir land of an evacuee, Nawab Nasiruddin Khan, and was described in his character roll as ‘lethargic and useless. He is also said to have close contacts with Pakistan . . . His son-in-law who formerly lived in Aligarh has gone to 48 ‘Members of DSO staff—complaint’ 14 May, 1955, ‘Personal File of Sri Syed Ahmed’, UPSA, Food and Civil Supply, Box 21, File 791/45. 49 Amar Chand, District Congress worker to the Chief Minister, UP, Lucknow, ‘Complaint against Sri SMH Khan Nawab, District Supply Officer Hamirpur’, 14 July, 1952, ‘Appointment of Sri Syed Mohd Hasan Khan Nawab, DSO/TRO’ UPSA, Food and Civil Supply, Box 14, File 964/45. 50 Confidential letter, dated 9 July, 1953, from DM, Allahabad, ‘Embezzlement in TRO Office, Allahabad’, UPSA, Rent Control C, Box 2, file 1140/1951.

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Pakistan. Although he says that he has no touch with him, yet his loyalty to the Indian Dominion cannot be said to be beyond doubt’.51 The ambiguous nature of citizenship and citizens’ rights in the late 1940s and early 1950s politicized the corruption surrounding rationing and civil supplies in a new way. A sense of uncertainty surrounding rationing for refugees and the policing of the new immigrants on UP’s streets was clearly apparent in the press. On the front page of the Lucknow National Herald on 6 January, 1948, two adjacent headlines appeared. The first, ‘Work as Protectors of the People’, reported on the speech of the UP Governor, Sarojini Naidu, to a police parade in Lucknow, in which she declared that those who worked for the freedom of India were no longer the ‘badmashes’. But alongside this article, another headline read, ‘Refugees tear gassed in Delhi’—the police had used tear gas on refugees who had attempted to take possession of houses in Phatak Habish Khan, vacated by Muslims.52 Similar kinds of conflicts were also taking place in Lucknow, over the municipal ban on street vendors, leading to a demonstration of refugees in the city, and the rumour of organized communal conspiracies to allow refugees to grab Muslim properties in January 1948.53 The conflict between the rhetoric of public service and the realities of post-partition on the streets, were echoed in the highly charged areas of housing and rationing. Importantly, the food and civil supply situation linked to the issue of refugees to and from Pakistan, since not only did many of the poorer refugees qualify for rationing, but also the same officers in charge of food and supplies, viz. the District Supply Officers and Town Rationing Officers, were also responsible for rent control in relation to evacuee properties. DSOs and TROs as ‘Relief and Rehabilitation’ officers, or rent controllers were again in the spotlight and because of the refugee situation their work was easily tied into the political rhetoric of communalism. As mentioned above, Muslim DSOs and TROs were particularly vulnerable to the accusation of communal bias, but such accusations were made all the easier by the extensive local power and discretion that evacuee 51 ‘Report of cases’ 25 January, 1950, in ‘Compulsory retirement of the official after completing the service of 25 years or attaining the age of 50 on the grounds of efficiency’, UPSA, Revenue B, Box 121, File 1082B/1948. 52 The National Herald (Lucknow), 6 January, 1948, p. 1. 53 ‘Refugee demonstration in Lucknow’, The National Herald (Lucknow), 21 January, 1948, p. 3; ‘Bid to buy property at cheap rates: capitalists among refugees behind communal troubles’, Ibid., p. 3.

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property rules allowed the officers themselves. P. D. Tandon, the champion of Hindu rights over independence, received a number of communications from Sindhi refugee organisations, complaining about Muslim bias in the actions of rent controllers. For example, on 29 January, 1950, the Sindhi Hindu Refugee Panchayat complained to Tandon, ‘That 4 rent controllers are appointed here for reducing the rents of the houses in which the refugees live. But they take the side of the landlords and harass the poor refugees and they dismiss the application of poor refugees.’ A list of Muslim government servants was also supplied by the Panchayat, who had allegedly kept evacuee properties in their hands and were collecting the rents. The Sindhi Hindu Refugee Panchayat claimed that refugees were dying of hunger and that the rent controllers were killing them, since ‘they do not get the houses from the Custodian owing to the interference of the influential persons and responsible authorities’. The organisation demanded that the evacuee property ordinance be put into force immediately and that steps should be taken against Muslim officers who were ‘disloyal to the government’.54 But these kinds of complaints about ‘corrupt’ or ‘communal’ decision making were possible precisely because so much local power had been given to supply officers and rent controllers.55 In some places, TROs and DSOs held up the renewal of trade licenses and rations as a kind of local sanction against displaced persons who had illegally occupied vacated Muslim properties. And, although it was not officially sanctioned, policy surrounding evacuee properties in UP in the first two years after independence certainly encouraged the situation. The UP Custodian of evacuee property made it clear that officers on the ground could make up their own minds about such properties: As I mentioned to you we want to be fair in the administration of the law. We have no intention of penalising the Muslim nationals of India. But the Pakistan Muslims cannot be treated leniently. If the District Officer, after making summary enquiries, is morally convinced that a person is an evacuee as defined by the law, that person’s property must be taken over . . . We do not want long drawn out legal proceedings, and have, for that reason, cut out all interference by the courts. If we ourselves start entrusting the administration 54 The representative of the Sindhi Hindu Refugee Panchayat, Jaipur, Durgapur Camp, Gopaldas H. Ladhani, Congress Social Worker to p. D. Tandon 29 January, 1950, National Archives of India, Tandon Papers, File 301. 55 For a comparative study of how this played out in Bengal, see Joya Chatterji, The Spoils of Partition: Bengal and India, 1947–1967 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 129–131.

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of the law not to administrators, but to judicial officers, we shall be defeating the purpose of the Ordinance. Apart from peculation and corruption that will spring up, proof will be exceedingly difficult.

The Custodian pointed out that the UP government could not allow people to just turn up and claim that they are not evacuees but loyal Indian citizens, as has happened in Delhi. ‘If he is not here, he cannot turn up, and that is the best proof of his being an evacuee and his property being evacuee property.’56 The actions of those administering such properties in UP’s cities and elsewhere were as deeply immersed in local political networks, as those officers, described above, who controlled rationed goods. It is, therefore, easy to see how the personal motivations of Muslim officers, in potentially lucrative, corrupt transactions, were often publicly associated with political disloyalty, particularly when such accusations suited the purposes of an officer’s political opponents.

Conclusion For most of the late colonial period in UP, intricate webs of influence built through the local state existed as entrenched ‘customary’ pockets of power, where the question of corruption was highly ambiguous.57 As Raj Chandavarkar has shown, this situation was tolerated partly because the British needed to cement conservative alliances in the countryside, and were unwilling to upset existing fiefdoms, beyond maintaining gazetted officer esprit de corps.58 They also lacked money and manpower. These weaknesses were magnified once war threatened to upset relative economic and political stability. The supply and control policies of the mid-1940s effectively created a system of rules and under-manned bureaucracies which opened up all kinds of new financial opportunities for those able to use their existing local contacts. Later, this provided rich pickings in a system of factional one-party dominance, which depended (as Paul Brass’s 56 V. D. Dantyagi to Bhagwan Sahay, 27 August, 1949, ‘Administration of Evacuee Property in UP—Method and Tracing out’ UPSA, Relief and Rehabilitation, Box 41, file 552/49. 57 This was also an idea expressed by Vibhuti Narain Rai in a range of meetings I had with him over the spring of 2008. 58 Rajnarayan Chandavarkar, ‘Customs of Governance: Colonialism and Democracy in Twentieth Century India’, Modern Asian Studies, 41, 3, (2007), pp. 441– 470.

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work shows, footnote 5) on personal and factional alliances, linking locality to district and state, and increasingly on the mobilization of political funds. The systematic exchange nexus and black money of licenses and permits, already there in the crisis years of 1942–1943, provided an ideal source. These were linkages which formed a kind of pre-history to the business-Congress links that went along with permit-license-quota raj, as shown by Stanley Kochanek (footnote 6). What this paper has begun to demonstrate too, though, is how this situation changed the experience of the local state for UP citizens. And this is where the supply bureaucrats form a crucial focal point. Managing the publicity of corruption certainly became more important. Posing oneself as ‘anti-corrupt’ was already seen as a cunning plan in the face of constant public controversy, and the sudden emergence of ‘citizens’ organisations’ directed by local Congress bodies became a new political ploy. The representation of corruption also changed over the 1940s and 1950s, presaging new ideas about the Indian public and their rights vis-à-vis the local state. Like never before, ‘corruption’ could describe a whole range of social ills: the instability and violence of the mid-1940s, the predicament and ‘rights’ of refugees, and the sensitive accusations of communalism. ‘Corruption’ or bhrashtachaar became a descriptive term with a richer content, a problem which redefined the challenges and limits of Indian citizenship, and an idea which later would come to be seen as a natural function of the everyday state. The changes in the representation of corruption between the late 1930s and 1950s, related to the increasing responsibilities of the state, and the impact of local officers in the everyday lives of ordinary Indian citizens. Food and Civil Supply was a crucial area, which administered rationing for UP’s urban poor, and controlled the supply of key industrial and manufacturing inputs. The development of the state machinery in this area coincided with three crucial political changes. Firstly, it came about at a time of increasing party political competition, when the roots of the ‘Congress system’ were forming. Secondly, it emerged when ideologies of the state were increasingly influenced by ideas about ‘modernization’ and ‘development’. Finally, it took place around the time of one of Asia’s largest mass migrations, and most widespread episodes of communal violence. As a result of these political intersections, as we saw in the first section, the idea of ‘corruption’ became more than just a description of administrative or political morality. It also connected to debates about how a ‘modern’ state might emerge from colonialism. Political

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and media discussions about corruption (compared with the interwar period) were now widely publicized and more clearly part of everyday gossip from the streets, right up to the assemblies. Corruption was also now represented in the press as a blight which affected increasing numbers of Indians as ‘citizens’, as they attempted to adjust and make sense of their political freedoms. As the second section explored, reference to the ‘corruption’ of others became a peculiarly useful political tool, in the new context of local political competition leading up to the first general elections: the strategies of UP’s many factional contests frequently made use of the involvement of opponents in corruption scandals, particularly those linked to civil supply. Finally, as the final section of this paper showed, ‘corruption’ was also a part of political discourses which marked out issues of loyalty to the state. Here, the relationship between India and Pakistan, and specifically, the ambivalent position of Muslim government servants in the aftermath of partition, was crucial. More than ever before, ‘corruption’ scandals became a means of marking out the rights and duties of ‘citizens’ rather than ‘subjects’ of the Indian state. However, alleged involvement in the scandal of corruption could pose problems, for some Indians at least, in how far their rights as citizens might be enjoyed.

C Cambridge University Press 2010 Modern Asian Studies 45, 1 (2011) pp. 57–80.  doi:10.1017/S0026749X10000223

Performing Peace: Gandhi’s assassination as a critical moment in the consolidation of the Nehruvian state YASM IN KHAN Department of Politics and International Relations, Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham, TW20 0PX, UK Email: [email protected]

Abstract The consolidation of the Nehruvian state’s sovereignty after Independence is traced here as a contingent event which was tightly linked to the impact of Gandhi’s assassination and the mourning rituals which followed his death in 1948. The Congress was able to use the funeral, mortuary rituals and distribution of Gandhi’s ashes to assert the power of the state and to stake the Congress Party’s right to sovereignty. This intersected with localized and religious expressions of grief. Gandhi’s death therefore acted as a bridge, spatially and temporally linking the distant state with the Indian people and underscoring transitions to Independence during the process of postcolonial transition from 1947–1950.

Introduction Despite ever-increasing attention to performance as a mode of politics and the way that performance has shaped political possibilities in the postcolonial era, Gandhi’s death and assassination, and associated mourning rituals, have been curiously neglected as sites of historical research.1 Gandhi was assassinated on 30 January, 1948 and his death was followed by epic public outpourings of grief. A public funeral 1 Versions of this paper have been presented at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of Edinburgh, University of Southampton and at the ‘Everyday State in South Asia’ workshop in Leeds in September 2008; I am grateful for many useful questions, comments and suggestions. On theatricality and ritual in the Indian political arena, see Thomas Blom Hansen, Wages of Violence. Naming and Identity in Postcolonial Bombay (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); Jim Masselos, The City in Action: Bombay Struggles for Power (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2007); and

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in New Delhi was followed by a fortnight-long official mourning period and then the immersion of his ashes in Allahabad. By any standards, the public reaction was overwhelming and there was widespread participation in these rituals by immense numbers of people. The mourners on the river banks at Allahabad were estimated as ‘numbering more than a million’.2 Indian nationalist historiography placed a considerable amount of emphasis on the date of Gandhi’s death as the turning point in ‘communal’ relations after Partition. This narrative conveys both the triumph of Congress over the adversities of Partition and the triumph of ‘secularism’ over ‘communalism’. It was also an important way to make sense of Gandhi’s assassination, as he was a martyr to the cause of ‘communal’ peace, and the public ‘returned to their senses’ only through his death. Yet the main bulk of posthumous scholarly attention to Gandhi’s assassination focuses on the legal case against Gandhi’s assassin, the prosecution of the accused and the Congress-directed suppression of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and other associated religious nationalist movements in the immediate aftermath of the killing.3 During the weeks following Gandhi’s death the prohibition on religious nationalist parties and the trial of his assassinator, Nathuram Godse, were used by the Congress Party to secure political power and leverage for the Congress vis à vis rivals and challengers. Some social complicity in Gandhi’s assassination and the failure of those around him to protect him were clear. The Kapur Commission of Inquiry blamed a generalized apathy about protecting Gandhi. He

Srirupa Roy, Beyond Belief: India and the Politics of Postcolonial Nationalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007). 2 The Times, 13 February, 1948. This figure was also used by the British High Commissioner in Delhi. 3 Christophe Jaffrelot, ‘Opposing Gandhi: Hindu Nationalism and Political Violence’ in D. Vidal, G. Tarabout, and E. Meyer, (eds), Violence/Non-Violence. Some Hindu Perspectives (Delhi: Manohar-CSH, 2003), pp. 299–324; David Hardiman, Gandhi in his Time and Ours (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2003), pp. 185–194; A. G. Noorani, Savarkar and Gandhi: The Godse Connection (Delhi: Leftword Books, 2002); Claude Markovits, The UnGandhian Gandhi: The Life and Afterlife of the Mahatma (London: Anthem Press, 2004); Ashis Nandy, ‘Final Encounter: the Politics of the Assassination of Gandhi’ in At the Edge of Psychology: Essays in Politics and Culture (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1980), pp. 70–99. Ashis Nandy’s article locates Gandhi’s assassination in its social and psychological context, unravelling the complex layers of interdependency between the assassin and the assassinated as mirror images of one another. Nandy stresses the fact that Gandhi’s thought threatened to subvert all the foundations of Godse’s own thinking, in his emphasis on de brahminsation, his understandings of Hinduism, and his re-evaluation of femininity and sexuality.

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was someone for whom the police, for decades, under the tutelage of the Raj, had become accustomed to perceiving as the enemy.4 In the first few hours, as the news of Gandhi’s death spread, mixed with grief, there was the fear that a Muslim may have been responsible, and the awareness that, if so, there could be many more attacks although the government went to great lengths to circulate information about Godse’s culpability quickly. But before the news was disseminated that a Hindu extremist had been responsible, there were violent attacks against Muslims in Lucknow and in Bombay.5 One ICS officer remembered the terror that ‘some lunatic Muslim’ might have been responsible, and the law and order authorities were on a state of high alert.6 Once the details emerged, incidents of inter-religious violence subsided, becoming rare for several weeks and then reviving on a reduced scale. On 4 February the RSS, Muslim National Guards and the Khaksars were banned. Across India, perhaps 200,000 RSS swayamsevaks were detained,7 and the state moved decisively against the RSS. In Uttar Pradesh, for example, there were around 2,000 arrests.8 The Hindu Mahasabha was not banned and continued to operate in ‘a shadowy area between what was acceptable in public life and what was not’.9 Both the RSS and Mahasabha had poor relationships with each other, and were wracked with internal dissent and organisational discord, as they attempted to reformulate their constitutions and 4

Nandy, ‘Final Encounter’, p. 89. Opinion of domestic political situation, (IOR) L/PJ/8/794, First half February, 1948. 6 M. A. Quraishi, Indian Administration Pre and Post Independence: Memoirs of an ICS (Delhi: BR Publishing, 1985), pp. 164–165. This moment of entangled anxiety and relief is also depicted in Salman Rushdies’s Midnight’s Children (London: Vintage, 1981), p. 142, when a packed cinema hall hears the news of Gandhi’s death: ‘. . .and finally the radio gave us the name. NathuRam Godse. “Thank God”, Amina burst out, “it’s not a Muslim name!” And Aadam, upon whom the news of Gandhi’s death had placed a new burden of age: “This Godse is nothing to be grateful for!”. Amina, however, was full of the light-headedness of relief, she was rushing dizzily up the long ladder of relief. . . “why not, after all? By being Godse he has saved our lives!”.’ Gandhi’s death was also widely mourned in Pakistan. If Gandhi had been killed by a Muslim, the national and international outcomes could have been gravely different. On the impact of Gandhi’s assassinations among Muslims see, Gyanendra Pandey, Remembering Partition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 145. 7 Walter Andersen and Shridhard Damle, The Brotherhood in Saffron: the RSS and the Hindu Revivalism (Boulder: Westview Press, 1987), pp. 51–52. 8 B. R. Nanda (ed.), Selected Works of Govind Ballabh Pant (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993) Vol. 12, p. 44. Pant at a press conference, 15 December, 1948. 9 Bruce Graham, Hindu Nationalism and Indian Politics: the origins and development of the Bharatiya Jana Sangh (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 12. 5

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establish new agendas.10 The reputation of the Mahasabha was also damaged by the assassination. As the General Secretary admitted, The diabolical murder of the Mahatma Gandhi has for the time being besmirched the fair name of the Hindu Mahasabha and I must confess with pain that there is considerable panic and nervousness amongst the responsible members and workers of the Hindu Sabha in the United Provinces.11

The crackdown against the RSS could be used to exclude factional rivals within the Congress. There were many ways in which ideological binaries between secularism and communalism became blurred in local politics and remained far from clear-cut.12 However, for the purposes of this paper, it can be stressed that this was a major consolidation of power following Gandhi’s death, both at a mundane and a symbolic level: through the selective use of the state apparatus, and the strengthening of Nehru’s prime ministerial authority; the trial of Godse and his co-conspirators staged in the Red Fort; sanctions against the complicit rajas of Alwar and Bharatpur; the arrest and imprisonment of many Congress ‘opponents;’ and a prosecular propaganda and educational drive. This guaranteed the ascendancy of secularism and democracy as the legitimate ideological foundation of the Indian state and its constitutional and legal status, notwithstanding grave failures in implementation. As Gyanendra Pandey has suggestively noted, it is an improbable story of how a certain kind of bodily sacrifice in the public sphere—and a refusal by one outstanding leader to give his consent to the particular conception of the political community that was emerging— changed the nature of sociality at the local level.13

The mundane consolidation of this power was made explicit in the aftermath of Gandhi’s death, for example, the draft constitution of the Indian Union and the first annual budget of free India were both 10 On the inner struggles of these organisations, see Andersen and Damle, Brotherhood in Saffron, Graham, Hindu Nationalism, Chapter 2, and Cristophe Jaffrelot, The Hindu Nationalist Movement and Indian Politics, Chapter 2. 11 All India Hindu Mahasabha papers, M-19 (1948), Statement of Bishan Chandra Seth, 1948. 12 William Gould, Hindu Nationalism and the Language of Politics in Late Colonial India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Ayesha Jalal, Self and Sovereignty: Individual and Community in South Asian Islam since 1950 (London: Routledge, 2000). 13 Pandey, Remembering Partition, p. 145.

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published in early March 1948, only six weeks after Gandhi’s ashes had been scattered. Yet, there has been little attention paid to the funeral and mourning rituals themselves as political events, widely shared and experienced by recently-emancipated postcolonial Indians, new citizens of the Indian nation state. The historical record has intuitively recorded Gandhi’s death as ‘a turning point’ but has assumed this as a priori and due to the ‘natural’ shock of his death. This change in mood cannot be assumed as natural, though, given the severe and ongoing consequences of Partition and Gandhi’s own unpopularity at the time. Assassinations are random and contingent events, but also unfold ‘in the terms of a particular cultural field, from which the actors draw meaning’.14 Assassinations are not necessarily integrative, and death rituals do not necessarily bring people together in a Durkheimian sense.15 Indira Gandhi’s assassination in 1984 was followed by grave violence against Sikhs and violence against Muslims and RSS members followed Gandhi’s own death in the hours after his killing. State funerals of renowned individuals are, by their very nature rooted in the final rites of a person’s life and their deep emotional resonance present opportunities that assist political actors to transcend social cleavages. Funerals may act to assimilate and to cohere disparate social groups. The respect due to the dead places a taboo on dissent and may lead, whether in Republican France or nineteenth-century America, to exceptional political solidarity and temporary exemption from the mundane, the partisan and the divisive.16 But this outcome cannot be taken for granted and politics may be shaped by the process of mourning itself.17 In the Indian sub-continent the political usage of 14 Marshall Sahlins, Apologies to Thucydides: Understanding History as Culture and Vice Versa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), p. 291. 15 Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (Originally published in 1912, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 16 Avner Ben-Amos, Funerals, Politics and Memory in Modern France, 1789–1996 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Barry Schwartz, ‘Mourning and the Making of a Sacred Symbol: Durkheim and the Lincoln Assassination’ Social Forces, Vol. 70, No. 2 (December 1991). 17 ‘Mourning may be used’, write Rebecca Saunders and Kamran Aghaie ‘for hegemonic or counter hegemonic, oppressive or emancipatory, purposes; processes of mourning contain a formidable cache of loose power, ideologically useful affect, and empty signifiers that numerous entities—religious, political, social, economic— have not failed to put to use’. Rebecca Saunders and Kamran Aghaie, ‘Introduction: Mourning and Memory’ Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, Vol. 25 No. 1 (2005), p. 22. See also, Michael C. Kearl, Endings: A Sociology of Death and Dying (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989); Liz Wilson (ed.), The Living and the

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tombs and death anniversaries has a particularly rich and complex pre-colonial history and in the twentieth century this has been wellutilized and adapted for political purposes by the Congress Party, whose own leading dynasty has been peculiarly afflicted by a series of unfortunate deaths and assassinations.18 Indeed, the centrality of death to Indian life and religious thought, the importance of violent deaths in particular and their appropriation by both Brahmanical Hindusim and folk cults, suggests that Gandhi’s death was a political event with the capacity for deep social transformation.19 This paper does not seek to challenge the intuitive and empirical evidence which emphatically shows that 30 January, 1948 was a critical turning point. Rather than revise this historical orthodoxy, this paper will argue that it was not only the fact of Gandhi’s death itself but through the performance of the attendant rituals, ceremonies and the public and private manifestations of grief that Indian state sovereignty was consolidated and extended. Here, the term ‘sovereignty’ is used to signal a concern with how a postcolonial state, to some extent exogenously created by external intervention, expands and consolidates its imagined, figurative and metaphorical power in the political sphere after the moment of independence. The maintenance of sovereign power preoccupies all states but raises particular issues in the context of decolonization. In postcolonial states patrimonial, community and religious centres of power have vied for omnipotence with the sovereign power of the nation state in overlapping and intersecting ways.20 The postcolonial state expands and attempts the displacement of

Dead: Social dimensions of death in South Asian religions (New York: State University of New York Press, 2003); and Peter Metcalf and Richard Huntington, Celebrations of Death: The Anthropology of Mortuary Ritual (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 18 The affliction of South Asian dynasties such as the Bhuttos and Nehru-Gandhis by assassination deserves further critical investigation and analysis. 19 Claus Peter Zoller and Elisabeth Schombucher (eds), Ways of Dying: Death and its Meanings in South Asia (Manohar, 1999), Stuart H. Blackburn, ‘Death and Deification: Folk Cults in Hinduism’, History of Religions, Vol. 24, No. 3 (February, 1985), pp. 255–274. 20 For valuable discussions of contested sovereignty in the postcolonial context see Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); Thomas Blom Hansen and Finn Steputtat (eds), Sovereign Bodies: Citizens, Migrants and States in the Postcolonial World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005); Thomas J. Biersteker and Cynthia Weber (eds), State Sovereignty as Social Construct (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

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‘lower-order legitimacies’ but is ever only partially able to do so.21 In India, where state sovereignty has exuded a powerful imaginary in many places, there has been a project of retrospectively naturalising the appearance of state-sovereignty fit. Naturalising sovereign power is always an ongoing enterprise. There is a particular irony here as Gandhi himself was an advocate of alternative forms of sovereignty and an important critic of the Westphalian nation state. Yet, Gandhi’s death provides a moment during which the sovereign power of the nation-state, led by the Congress Party (which Gandhi was also deeply critical of by the time of his death), could be expanded and consolidated. This is not to suggest either a simplistic reductionism in which the power of the secular state becomes fixed, sovereign and settled after Gandhi’s death. Clearly this had to be constantly remade and reiterated. Riots continued alongside the economic and political marginalization of Muslims and myriad problems concerning the consolidation of the nation state. The public reactions to Gandhi’s assassination made a decisive difference in the reception of statecentric articulations of secularism by inscribing power in a particular idiom at a time when alternative Hindu-nationalist formations had been far from discredited. Grassroots interpretations of Gandhi’s assassination intersected with the modernizing and memorializing political discourse of the Congress. The ways in which the Congress acted as ‘the state’ during the funeral was vital. The bestowing of the ashes, organization of the rituals without colonial constraints, and use of the full force of the media and governmental resources, interlinked provinces and districts through a chain of instructions and commands. Debates about the nature of the state in postcolonial South Asia have pointed to the Nehruvian state’s distance and detachment from everyday, commonsense and quotidian life in the 1950s. The state led a project of transformation, regulating citizens’ bodies and naturalizing sovereign power while unexpectedly colliding with the upward pressures of alternative centres of sovereignty. There has also been increasing ‘entanglement’, in the words of Partha Chatterjee, of elite and subaltern politics since independence.22 In this light, 21 The phrase is from Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), p. 31. 22 See discussions in this Special Issue. Also, Thomas Blom Hansen and Finn Steputtat (eds), States of Imagination: Ethnographic Explorations of the Postcolonial State (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001); Thomas Blom Hansen and Finn Steputtat

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Gandhi’s death and attendant rituals sit within a specific matrix of circumstances at a critical juncture, where both temporally and spatially the sovereignty of the postcolonial state was still uncertain. The contested nature of state sovereignty and the human and ideological insecurity was part of an extended process in the months following Partition. The vast humanitarian challenges of refugee resettlement collided with the problems of contested borders, the incorporation of the princely states, tense relations with Pakistan, particularly but not solely about Kashmir, and a dark shadow over the authority of Nehru who was engaged in private ideological tussles with the Home Minister.23 Private armies substituted for police authority and political activists were able to heavily influence policy and circumvent or challenge state authority or replace it altogether at many levels of government, and in many provinces. The Mahatma’s funeral in New Delhi, 30 January–1 February 1948 Gandhi’s funeral, carried out in New Delhi within 24-hours of his death, was a curious hybrid of colonial ritual, Hindu tradition, and spontaneous outpourings of public grief. It was the first state spectacle organized in independent India after Independence Day in 1947. The funeral was an invented ritual which deviated from ‘traditional’ Hindu funerary rites, for instance, the bier was not carried by kinsmen but placed on a carriage. It was also infused with imperial echoes of the Delhi durbars while displaying many of the tropes of the annual Republic Day ceremony. It may have been familiar, then, in some ways to the crowd but was also unique and unrepeatable. The militarism of Gandhi’s funeral (and the sheer irony of it) has been observed by contemporary commentators and later writers. (eds), Sovereign Bodies: Citizens, Migrants and States in the Postcolonial World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005); and Partha Chatterjee ‘Sovereign Violence and the Domain of the Political’ in Hansen and Steputtat (eds), Sovereign Bodies, p. 85. 23 Yasmin Khan, The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan (London: Yale University Press, 2007). Srirupa Roy identifies the same dates, describing this as the ‘long transition’ from colonial rule, Beyond Belief, pp. 25–26, 70. See also Dipesh Chakrabarty, Rochona Majumdar and Andrew Sartori (eds), From the Colonial to the Postcolonial: India and Pakistan in Transition (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2007). Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar emphasizes the protracted and constructed nature of the Pakistani and Indian states during the processes accompanying Partition, The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia: Refugees, Boundaries, Histories (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007).

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Four-thousand troops, 1,000 armed men, 100 police and 100 navy men marched in the funeral procession itself, including the Rajputana Rifles, Madras Regiment, Bengal Sappers and Miners, Indian Signal Corps, armoured vehicles and the mounted cavalry of the GeneralGovernor’s bodyguard. Gandhi’s body was carried from Birla House24 on the morning of the funeral and placed on a converted gun carriage which was very heavily covered in flowers and sandalwood, with only the face of the Mahatma visible. This was pulled by troops, with relatives and other disciples on foot in front of it. At a quarter to mid-day the cortege pulled out of the driveway to the sound of blown conch-shells. The procession moved from Albuquerque road onto Queensway then onto Kingsway and to the India Gate, which it reached less than an hour later, with Gurkhas and paratroopers proceeding in front in order to clear the way. Baldev Singh, Nehru and Patel were seated alongside the body by this time on the main vehicle itself, with Gandhi’s son, Devdas Gandhi, as the chief mourner, seated at the head of the vehicle. The kinship of the leading Congressmen with Gandhi was therefore visibly emphasized with Nehru naturally assuming the role of ‘son and heir’. The cortege then moved through the Memorial Gate and then to Hardinge Avenue, Mathura Road and Powerhouse Road (one reminder of the ongoing process of transition to independence was that these roads were still bearing their old names) ending at the bank on the edge of the river Yamuna. State funerals had been used consciously as a political tool within and between imperial states prior to independence.25 The elaborate design, planning and execution of Gandhi’s last rites was a selfconscious manifestation of state (and the Congress Party) sovereignty intended to inscribe state power (and the power, as Thomas Blom Hansen has put it of the ‘sublime state’)26 at a time of acute crisis 24 Birla house was at 5 Albuquerque Road, renamed after the date of Gandhi’s death as Tees January Marg. 25 Modern state funerals in Britain were a Victorian innovation. When the Nawab of Oudh was deposed in 1856, the exiled Queen Mother travelled to Europe. She died in Paris and was given a French state funeral as a diplomatic snub to Britain. Controversies continue about the political implications of state funerals in South Asia; consider the debates about Mother Theresa’s televised state funeral in 1998. 26 In understanding this, Thomas Blom Hansen offers a useful analytical framework. He examines the ‘myth of the state’ in India, in other words, the multiple ways in which the state is understood and perceived. He argues that the Indian state is typically imagined in a dual way; on one side there is the ‘profane’ aspect of the state, which encompasses the self-interest, brutality and banality in the humdrum of everyday administration. Corruption, violence and inefficiency would all be included

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in the legal, policing and governmental strategies of the state. In the processional part of the funeral the ‘Hindu-ness’ of Gandhi was thoroughly marginalized. Infused with colonial symbolism, certain aspects of the ceremony could have been replicated along Whitehall or the Mall in London. Indeed it echoed explicitly the state funerals of British monarchs in the use of flags at half-mast, the guncarriage, military pageantry and use of a crowd-lined mall. The funeral was extensively photographed by Henri Cartier-Bresson and other international photographers and also aerially photographed. It was projected into the homes and marketplaces of Indians who could not attend through a specially relayed live All India Radio broadcast. This lengthy outdoor broadcast in itself was a technological feat which utilized the latest technology such as a mobile transmitter van.27 The appropriation of, and expansion into, the grand colonial architectural spaces of Lutyen’s and Herbert Baker’s Delhi, in parallel with ceremonies and rituals on Independence Day and Republic Days, was deliberate. It speaks clearly of the explicit aim of linking Gandhi (who after all had no formal political position within the state at the time and had of course worked in opposition to many of the power monopolies and militarism of the Westphalian nation-state) to the visible architecture of Delhi’s state power. This did not pass unremarked upon by eye-witnesses, particularly the design of the route which entailed the body passing under the India Arch, now called ‘India Gate’. He was the first Indian to be ‘honoured’ in such a way. ‘His going under the India Gate was perhaps symbolic. Alive he would

in this category. On the other side stands the ‘sublime’ aspects of the mysterious and powerful state, which is known through ‘its hidden resources, designs and immense power, and the higher forms of rationality or even justice believed to prevail there’. Ordinary Indians look to the state as the arbiter of legitimate claims and the provider of law and order, even if on many occasions it fails in this role. It is therefore essential that this myth of the state is upheld. T. Blom Hansen, ‘Governance and Myths of State in Mumbai’ in, Chris J. Fuller and Veronique Beneii (eds), The Everyday State and Society in Modern India (London: Hurst, 2001), pp. 34–38. 27 Sabeena Gadihoke, ‘Uncovering Histories: Homai Vyarawalla and chronicling the nation’ in Homage to Mahatma Gandhi (Unpublished paper, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi). The appropriation and use of All India Radio by the Congress was another important way to extend imagined sovereignty in 1947– 1948—a medium with national reach but tightly controlled and closed to political leaders until independence. After independence Congress made regular use of the medium to convey national messages. See Alasdair Pinkerton, ‘Radio and the Raj: broadcasting in British India (1920–1940)’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society ISSN 1356–1863, Volume 18.2, 2008, pp. 167–191.

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have scoffed at the idea’, noted one observer.28 Naturally the personal role of Mountbatten who had remained in India as Governor-General and was a very astute believer in, and manipulator of, theatrical and public pageantry was also a hidden hand behind the planning of these aspects of the funeral procession. The crowds, as seen in news reels and photographs, were spectacularly large and densely packed and stood mostly in a ‘passive’ role as stunned and silent onlookers. Nehru had paternalistically reminded people of the need for silence and had, interestingly, requested no ‘demonstrations’ on the radio the evening before. Some had scrambled up trees and lamp posts in order to try and take darshan (sight) of the Mahatma and the silence was punctuated with loud cries of ‘Mahatma Gandhi ki Jai’ and ‘Mahatma Gandhi Zindabad’ (Long live Gandhi). At the site of the pyre at Rajghat, shrubs and nettles had been cleared to create a space for the cremation and a brick and mud platform was raised on which the pyre was built. The intended plan was that the dignitaries and relatives would assemble close to the pyre. The crowds were to be held back from the main site by a cordon of barbed wire which was at least one hundred yards away from the platform where the body lay. The barrier was manned by mounted troops who were charged with holding back the pressing crowds. The ceremony was to be public, but not so public that all Indians could participate in it, and ambassadors and other foreign dignitaries were privileged in their nearness to the body. The Chinese ambassador, for instance, was the first to lay a wreath at the foot of the pyre. Lord and Lady Mountbatten, who had absented themselves consciously from the procession, now also joined the inner circle and were seated around the cremation site. The national flag was removed from the body and sandalwood logs were piled up on top of it. Ramdas Gandhi performed the lighting of the pyre and the attending priest, Pandit Ram Dhan Sharma, recited Vedic texts. As the flames climbed upwards crowds surged forward against the cordon, broke it and rushed forward ‘dangerously close to the pyre’. 28 K. L. Gauba, The Assassination of Mahatma Gandhi (Bombay: Jaico, 1969), p. 160. These colonial continuities in ritual planning have been remarked upon in other contexts; the assumption of pre-colonial motifs and rituals by the British in colonial darbars and, in the post-1947 years, the postcolonial state’s appropriation of restyled imperial ritual for events like Republic Day. Bernard Cohn, An Anthropologist among the Historians and Other Essays (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996); Jim Masselos, ‘India’s Republic Day: The Other 26 January’, South Asia Vol. 19 (special issue) (1996), pp. 183–203; Roy, Beyond Belief, pp. 66–105.

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Troops were directed to intervene and Nehru was personally seen urging people to go back while leading members of the cabinet picked up small children. Eventually, mounted lancers were used to physically press back the people who had come to see Gandhi’s last rites. The spatial and hierarchical distance of the VIPs was therefore vigorously and repeatedly reinforced through the cordoning off of separate areas, the use of barbed wire and the lathi charges and use of mounted troops. Leading politicians stressed the need for orderly discipline throughout the crowds.29 The funeral itself the was undoubtedly a spectacular sight but appears to have been oddly disconnected from the mass of Indian people in the crowd who, for the most part, were consigned to playing the roles allotted by Nehru as onlookers, passive crowds, respectfully distanced from the Mahatma’s body. This spectacle was orientated in many ways to the international gaze. The importance of Gandhi as a Great Man in the eyes of the world’s leading politicians was paramount. Gandhi’s greatness and by extension, Indian-ness itself, were being honoured and making headline news from Washington DC to Beijing. This global recognition was another important ingredient of Gandhi’s death. This was particularly pronounced on the political right-wing. The Uttar Pradesh Congressman Purushottam Das Tandon emphasized how, ‘World history will still remember him when many other figures strutting the world stage today are forgotten’.30 It was only the beginning of a wide series of official and semi-official mourning rituals and contrasts with the wide array of mourning practices all over India. A fortnight of mourning and the immersion of Gandhi’s ashes In contrast to the official state funeral, which had been organized by the Commander-in-Chief and centred upon Delhi and orientated towards the international gaze, local and state level mourning took on vernacular forms which far transcended official instructions and 29 The disciplining of crowds took on new dimensions now that the Congress was the party of sovereign power, raising critical questions about the legitimacy of crowd action. See Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘In the name of politics: Sovereignty, Democracy and the Multitude in India’ Economic and Political Weekly, 23 July, 2005. 30 The Pioneer, 2 February, 1948. The Pioneer, a Lucknow-based English language paper, contained particularly detailed reports on the funeral and its aftermath in 1948.

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orders from the Congress Party. Gandhi emerged now as a saintly personage and even miracle-worker and his corporeal relics took on a special importance. It was this mediation of the funereal rites by the public which transformed the rituals from empty or ‘banal’ state-centred gestures and infused them with political meaning and transformative possibilities. It may have instigated the groundswell of feeling in favour of ‘secularism/toleration’ towards non-Muslims. This gave much-needed credibility to Nehruvian secularism with which this historical moment is now so well (and rightly) associated. Almost immediately after Gandhi’s death a struggle over how to honour his memory and how to dispose of his physical body began. A strong lobby for embalming Gandhi’s body in the manner of Lenin was fought off with Nehru’s personal intervention. He even mentioned it in his address to the nation the night preceding the funeral. ‘It was his wish repeatedly expressed that this should not be done. . .we decided we must follow his wishes in this matter no matter how much others might have wished otherwise’.31 However, although traditional cremation was decided upon, the veneration of Gandhi’s body and, after his cremation, of his relics, went far beyond state-sanctioned or officially orchestrated proceedings. After the actual darshan of the body itself was no longer possible, following the cremation ceremony, the crowds continued to pursue a physical connection with Gandhi, preferably by looking at or touching his bodily remains, or if that was not possible, by puja (reverent worship) and prayers in front of his image. There was a clamber for Gandhi’s bodily remains, both physically at the site of Raj Ghat and then in many ensuing debates surrounding the distribution of his ashes. After the pyre had burned out at Raj Ghat on the evening of the funeral, even late at night large crowds still remained. ‘There was a great scramble and a diligent search for small twigs of the sandal chips near the pyre and many were seen with the greatest reverence picking up withered and trodden rose petals, picking up twigs from the mound of wreaths or bits of ash blown by the breeze’.32 At the site of the place where the Mahatma had fallen as a result of the gunshots at Birla house, the spot where his blood had fallen also became a sacred site and a deep pit emerged as people gathered up handfuls of the earth,

31 32

Ibid., 31 January, 1948. Ibid., 2 February, 1948.

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at the back of Birla House bamboo poles have been erected round the spot where Mahatma Gandhi fell in order to discourage the public from scooping handfuls of earth to preserve as sacred souvenirs. There was already a pit over a foot deep. A large number of people visited the spot today and offered prayers.33

Indeed, access to this site itself became controversial and highly contested. Birla House introduced visiting hours as a way of managing the crowds and the Congress High Command received bitter complaints about denial of access to the site. As Bhagwan Das Halna wrote to Nehru, I beg to apologise to write this letter to you. Had it not been a matter of utmost national importance, I would certainly not have troubled you with it. The thing is that not only I but millions of Indians think that the place where the Mahatmaji was shot dead has become sacred and is like a pilgrimage to us. On the evening of 13th March 48 I went to Birla House to pay my respectful homage to this sacred place but was told that people were not allowed to enter in Birla House for this purpose since 11th February. I was simply dumbfounded and had to return very sadly and with tears in my eyes. . . . When pacci vedi [an altar] has been constructed there and when the same is worshipped daily with flowers according to press reports, we also should not be deprived of that puja.34

Some demanded that the bones should be preserved rather than scattered and telegrammed in protest. ‘Gandhiji’s ashes alone may be dissolved. Request preservation of bones as sacred relics. Recalling preservation of Buddha’s relics. Pray issue instructions’.35 Indeed, this explicit parallel drawn with Buddha was not far-fetched. During the two-week mourning period, Gandhi’s former role as a political leader, associated with politicized decisions such as the balance of payments settlement with Pakistan, seems to have been transcended. As the day of the immersion ceremony at the sangam at Allahabad approached, one English language newspaper headline even suggested, ambivalently, ‘Mahatma Gandhi being worshipped’.36 33

Ibid., 2 February, 1948. Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, All India Congress Committee papers G-8 Part 2 (1947) [Hereafter AICC], Bhagwan Das Halna to Nehru 19 March, 1948. In his reply on 9 April, the Congress secretary, Sadiq Ali, acknowledged, ‘We are aware of the widespread feeling in the matter you have raised in your letter. The matter is receiving our serious consideration.’ 35 The Pioneer, 9 February, 1948, Telegram to Nehru. 36 Ibid., 11 February, 1948. 34

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Most significantly of all, the national fortnight of mourning declared by the Congress leadership coincidentally coincided with the holding of the Ardh Kumbh Mela at Allahabad, or Prayag, at the confluence of three rivers Ganga, Yamuna and Saraswati, which was held every six years and at which thousands of sadhus, gurus and pilgrims had gathered for a mass ritual bathing, for the cleansing of past sins. At the camp at the Ardh Kumbh Mela, thousands of pilgrims daily were praying in front of a large portrait of the Mahatma which had been placed on a dais with a charkha (spinning wheel) in front of it, and the Quran and the Gita on either side of it. They were reported to be ‘worshipping the dais as a temple of God and many of them have even offered coins as is customary in temples of other deities’.37 Over the following fortnight the kinship of the deceased and his relationship to the broader community were constantly articulated and made explicit in the rituals themselves and in the wider media commentary. The paternalistic role of ‘Bapu’ (Father) had a long lineage in the anti-colonial movement. After death this status was reinforced by a gendered vocabulary which stressed the orphaning and child-likeness of the people left without their leader. Devdas Gandhi spoke of his countrymen as ‘fellow orphans’ and the headline of The Pioneer, marked with a black border on 31 January, proclaimed ‘The nation is fatherless’. Devdas’ broadcast on All India Radio was an intimate and personal account of Gandhi’s last days and minutes and the procedures for dealing with the body after his passing. This included details of his final breaths, how the body was undressed and the location of clots of blood. This metaphor of Gandhi as the father and co-parent to Mother India was prevalent in the following two weeks. Intimate rituals, usually closed to all but the closest kin, were shared by all. Although the family were closely involved, the Congress was also projected as an extended ‘family’ and Nehru was very much the ‘son’ and heir with his own political status and authority clearly reinforced in the aftermath of the death. The collective responsibility for Gandhi’s death, as stressed by Nehru and Congress leaders, was reiterated in public discourse.38 This also had resonance with Indian understandings of death. An innocent victim, subject to a sudden and violent death, universally carries a special status across varieties of Hindu belief. A ‘bad or 37

Ibid., 11 February, 1948. See for example, N. N. Agarwala, India’s Saviour Crucified: A challenge for us to think and act (Agra: Shiva Publication, 1948). 38

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untimely death’, which has come suddenly and at the hands of a murderer, can only be redeemed or transmuted into a ‘good death’ (akal mrityu) through the actions and good intentions of those who serve the deceased. In this context, the extraordinary outpouring of grief and ritual honouring of Gandhi’s memory and image, and the substantive political changes which occurred almost immediately in the aftermath of Gandhi’s death, can be properly understood. There was almost obsessive concern about the manner and timing of Gandhi’s death and an intimate association between the people and the deceased as a paternalistic presence. As Jonathan Parry writes, ghosts are likely to recur unless ‘appropriate propitiatory rituals are perfectly performed’.39 In the classical reading, Gandhi’s own death would have been a product of his own bad karma. This almost unthinkable proposition posed a challenge for the society in which it had taken place. A bad death could at least be transmuted into a better one by propitiatory rituals and by a time of tranquillity and good fortune. This had a direct political implication and there was a repeated emphasis in the political rhetoric on the notion of shame. Gandhi’s death was a product of the Indian people’s own wrongdoing and had to be borne and atoned for by society as a collective ‘family’. As Nehru said, ‘We are all responsible for this unprecedented tragedy. . . . It is a disgrace that [the] people of India could not save Mahatma Gandhi’.40 In the crowds of mourners for Gandhi, symbolic acts such as head shaving, the removal of shoes and the donning of white khadi became widespread.41 The distribution of Gandhi’s ashes The fortnight of official mourning and the immersion ceremony in Allahabad, during which Gandhi’s ashes were immersed in the 39 Jonathan Parry, Death in Banaras (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 161–162. 40 Sarvepalli Gopal, (ed.), Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru [hereafter SWJN] (New Delhi, Oxford University Press) 2nd series, 5, pp. 63, 65. Speech at Jullundur, 24 February, 1948. 41 There were also parallels here with the death of princely rulers, such as the death of Maharaja Umaid Singh in 1947 and Maharaja Hanwant Singh of Jodhpur in 1952. These deaths were similarly not simply family matters but demanded widespread and overt public mourning over two weeks in which members of all communities participated by paying their respects, often by visiting the royal palace, many also shaving their heads. See Marzia Balzani, Modern Indian Kingship: Tradition, Legitimacy and Power in Jodhpur (Oxford: James Currey, 2003), p. 45.

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confluence of the rivers welded together a collective sense of responsibility for Gandhi’s death. This was twinned with renewed respect for the Congress Party and an enhanced sense of state power. The rituals involved a long circuitous special train journey that carried Gandhi’s ashes through the Uttar Pradesh political heartland of both Congress and Hindu nationalism. Then the Congress parcelled out ashes to all states of India. This played a decisive role in linking together reverence for Gandhi with the authority of the Congress and the state. The train, the Asthi Special,which carried Gandhi’s ashes to the prayag (confluence) at Allahabad was made up of five third-class carriages. The urn was placed in the middle carriage, heavily covered in flowers and khadi flags and illuminated by six electric lights, and so clearly visible to spectators from the platform. Large images of the charkha and Ashoka’s national lion seal were painted on the carriage. The deliberately engendered closeness between the national flag and the Congress flag, which were easily confused, was also reinforced by the presence of both national and Congress flags on the train. The train halted at ten stops in western Uttar Pradesh during its journey to Allahabad where vast crowds had assembled to take darshan.42 These rituals clearly drew upon earlier forms of Congress organization and resembled in many ways the Gandhian satyagrahas and Congress activities of a nostalgically-remembered Gandhian heyday.43 The funeral train, weaving its way from city to city in North India in 1948, presented a very familiar echo of earlier trains from which the fortunate could catch a darshan of the Mahatma. Many of the same people may have stood in the crowds. Black flags, used in the hartals (strikes) and processions of the Non-Cooperation, Civil Disobedience and Quit India movements, were a symbol of mourning but also resonant of these former days of public protest. Another familiar aspect was the role of the pledge, a regular Congress staple employed on Independence days and Republic days. Numerous speeches of Congress leaders in the aftermath of Gandhi’s death mentioned the need to pledge to communal peace, to honour Gandhi’s 42 There are echoes of President Lincoln’s funeral in 1865 which utilized a very long and public train journey through America and acted to cohere a divided public at a critical moment. See Barry Schwartz, ‘Mourning and the Making of a Sacred Symbol’. 43 Shahid Amin, for instance, has stressed the importance of train carriages and train stoppages during Gandhian campaigns of the early 1920s. Shahid Amin, Event, Metaphor, Memory: Chauri Chaura 1922–1992 (Delhi: Penguin edition, 2006), p. 189.

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principles and stressed the moment as a redemptive one. Pledges were solemnly sworn on the day of the funeral in collective meetings.44 The ceremonies also acted as physical places for old Congress comrades to meet with one another. Congressmen from all the UP provinces and adjoining provinces assembled at Allahabad for the immersion of the ashes. Nostalgic and sorrowful meetings acted as a way of reconsolidating Congress and as part of the party’s purification process. Centrally-directed commemorations were not a new innovation for the Congress and Lisa Trivedi has emphasized the importance of the ‘visual consistency’ of ritual holidays and the ‘reconfiguration of time’ by swadeshi proponents from the 1920s onwards, underpinned by specific calendars and well ordered agendas.45 Gandhi’s jayanti had long been celebrated annually in October and dates such as his incarcerations and fasts had been marked in the past. The death anniversaries of leaders such as Lala Lajpat Rai, G. B. Tilak and Bhagat Singh had long been signalled by processions, hagiographical press articles and emphasis on their sacrifices. In short, very familiar political tropes from the campaigns of the 1920s and 1930s (but which had become associated with an outdated mode of politics in many ways by the late 1940s) were revived by the funeral spectacle. The striking difference of course, now, was that the Congress had displaced British power and these Congress idioms could be presented as officially sanctioned government symbols. The funeral may have superficially, and initially, born all the hallmarks of imperial British ritual imposed from on high but this was rapidly subverted and transformed into a more complex interaction between Indian people and nationalist memory. In this light, the decision to distribute some of Gandhi’s ashes from Delhi to all the states of India was a political masterstroke on the part of the Congress. The instruction that ashes should be scattered in local rivers, spatially linked together India in a modern ‘cartographic 44 One, printed in a pamphlet, to be completed by the reader, read as follows: ‘I, rudely shaken to my very foundations by the sudden and unexpected demise of Bapuji, the Father of Our Nation, hereby pledge that I shall do everything possible, by action and thought, to see his cause succeed. I will see—| a) That communalism is eradicated from every walk of our life | b) That untouchability is liquidated once and for all, and | c) That Social and Economic Democracy is brought into reality, that being the latest mission which Gandhiji laid down in the Harijan. | I am affixing my signature to this pledge, after full realisation of the difficulties involved as also the significance of this mission. Babuji Zindabad, Jai Hind.’ (Agarwala, India’s Saviour Crucified, unpaginated.) 45 Lisa Trivedi, Clothing Gandhi’s Nation: Homespun and Modern India (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), pp. 102–108.

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imaginary’. This linked together the provinces of India with India’s physical geography and Gandhi’s actual bodily remains. This network radiated out from Delhi and was under direct Congress control and supervision.46 The ashes would be divided and portions would be sent to every provincial government, under the guidance of the state governors, who arrived in Delhi to collect the urns. The provincial governments were then directed to divide the ashes into three parts and to allocate them within their province. In reality this rule was flouted. In Bombay all ministers received a portion. The distribution of the ashes became a deeply political act, as provinces, leaders and districts struggled to assert their right to receive a portion of the sacred ashes. ‘There has been keen competition and pressing requests have been received both by the provincial governments and in Delhi for portions of the ashes from places not in the programme’.47 Quite plainly, there were not enough to go round. These can not simply be seen as acts of commemoration but became closely intertwined both with the extension and consolidation of political power by Congress provincial cadres and the marginalisation of opponents and factional rivals. The immersion ceremonies also provided an opportunity for the regrouping of Congressmen who came from long distances to participate. The final part of the programme included the following rivers: Godvari at Nasik, Krishna at Bezwada, Cauvery at Srirangam, Sabarmati at Ahmedabad, Hooghly at Calcutta, Sutlej in East Punjab, Mahanadi in Orissa, Rivers Gomti and Gaya, the Brahmaputra in Assam, the Pavnar at Wardha and the seashores at Puri, Rameshwaram, Cape Cormorin and Porbunder. In reality, an underground trade in these ashes quickly developed and there are still at least two (unauthorized) places (one in the USA and one in India) where people claim to have possession of Gandhi’s ashes. In 1997, ashes were uncovered in an urn in a bank vault in northern India, and were later scattered at the confluence of the Yamuna and Ganges rivers. Some ashes scattered in 2008 had been kept by Sriman Narayan, a businessman and associate of Gandhi and passed into the hands of his son, a businessman based in Dubai, upon Narayan’s death.48 46 On cartography and the visualization of space in modern India see Sumathi Ramaswamy (ed.) Beyond Appearances: Visual Practices and Ideologies in Modern India (Delhi: Sage Publications, 2003). 47 The Pioneer, 9 February, 1948. 48 ‘Father of the nation laid to rest: the afterlife of Mahatma Gandhi’. The Independent, Thursday, 31 January, 2008.

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It seems far from coincidental that several of the locations selected for the receipt of ashes were afflicted by inter-religious conflict. Decisions were motivated by the idea that social tensions could be alleviated by Gandhi’s ‘presence’ in the form of ashes, just as in life his presence had been a calming presence in riot-torn areas. In Punjab, where the severe refugee crisis continued on a daily basis, military and police led the procession for the consignment to the River Sutlej. The contested state of Hyderabad was not initially in the list of destinations scheduled to receive a portion of the remains, but was added as a last-minute inclusion to the list. The prominent participation of princely rulers also emphasized the inclusiveness of the event. The distribution of the ashes of Gandhi, in particular, was a way for the Congress Party to extend its patronage to rulers who were weakened by the Partition crisis and wanted to cement their affiliation with the Congress settlement or, conversely, to marginalize and undermine the legitimacy of others. A special train was laid on from Rampur, the small Muslim majority princely state in western Uttar Pradesh, which had been affected by violent protests due to the state’s accession to India. The Nawab of Rampur and ‘leading Hindu and Muslim citizens of the state’ came to Delhi to collect an urn of ashes, which was then carried back to the city, where the ashes were placed in a local river.49 In a country where large crowds frequently constitute and shape the performance of politics, the scale of public involvement in Gandhi’s death rituals deserves to be restated. The division of the ashes into parts, and the spiritual force with which they were vested meant that Gandhi could literally be in hundreds of places at once in February 1948. Special trains carried people from the districts to attend the immersion ceremonies. Meetings were held in mosques, churches, temples, educational institutions, trade unions, clubs, Congress committees and bar associations. The moment could also be utilized as a way of squaring conflict and providing an extraordinary outlet for reconciliation which would otherwise have been unavailable. A disputed plot of land contested by Hindus and Muslims in Bangla Bazaar, a suburb of Lucknow, was dedicated as a space to raise a memorial to Gandhi instead. The manner in which Gandhi’s remains were linked to the architectural spaces of the state, particularly provincial assembly

49

The Pioneer, 9 February, 1948.

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buildings, is also worth noting. In many other states, the prime minister, governor, ministers and members of the public filed past the ashes which had been placed in a glass case in a porch-way of the provincial assembly building alongside a vast portrait of the Mahatma. Gandhi’s image and memory were linked to the state’s physical machinery and to its municipal buildings, provincial assembly buildings, bureaucrats and symbols.50

Memorialization Nehru was strikingly self-conscious about Gandhi’s memorialization and reflexive about the ways in which Gandhi’s memory could be appropriated for national causes after his death. While wishing to honour him and to avoid opportunistic commemoration he was also astute about the utility of Gandhi’s death-memorials to the national cause. The importance of theatricality, performance, ritual and commemoration was as well understood by Nehru as by his viceregal predecessor—‘. . .brick and mortar has its uses’ he wrote on a proposed national memorial for Gandhi, ‘and is desirable to give some solid and substantial shape to our work. This has a psychological importance and a permanence’.51 The ownership of Gandhi’s memory and its connection to state power, however, rapidly became a challenge to centralized authority. Nehru in particular consistently attempted to define the limits of commemoration and to create a centralized monopoly on the project of Gandhi’s memorialization. Provincial Congress cadres and local groups went too far and Nehru complained that too many streets and places were being named after Gandhi which would result in confusion. He was concerned at signs of coercive actions to extract donations to Gandhi memorial funds. He intervened to reverse an order making

50 Film footage of the regional ceremonies reinforces this point and suggests the ways in which state officials were involved, the scale of crowd participation and the different ceremonial procedures accompanying the immersion of the ashes into the waters. See Babuji’s Demise available at http://www.gandhiserve.org [accessed 27 September 2010]. This film shows the immersion of Gandhi’s ashes, processions, crowds and ceremonies at Allahabad, Calcutta, Bombay, Madras, Kanya Kumari, Travancore, Cochin, Ahmedabad, Kandla and Nasik. 51 Valmiki Choudhary (ed.), Dr. Rajendra Prasad: Correspondence and Select Documents (Allied Publishers, 1984–1995), vol. 8, p. 58. Note from Nehru on proposed national memorial for Gandhi.

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compulsory deductions from the salaries of civil service officers in Uttar Pradesh.52 He also personally oversaw the sites associated with the cremation and funeral. ‘The surface of the platform on which Mahatma Gandhi’s body was cremated may be cemented in order that people in search of sacred earth from the spot will not be able to tamper with it’ he instructed within days of the cremation.53 Concrete, then, the ultimate symbol of the modernizing and developmental aspirations of the postcolonial state, could, quite literally, be used to seal Gandhi’s memory and to limit people’s interaction with his corporeal remains. Nehru also made protestations about ‘unauthorized’ or public expressions of grief in the form of statues, basing his arguments on an aesthetic sensibility underpinned by a hierarchy of artistic expression which is worth quoting at length: Nevertheless, it is perhaps inevitable that some statues might be put up. If so, the greatest care should be taken that only real works of art are permitted. Unfortunately the standard in India of such statuary has been low and most people are satisfied with anything that bears a remote resemblance to the person concerned. Our cities and public places are full of structures which cannot by any stretch of the imagination be called artistic or pleasing to the sight. I have been shocked on many occasions at seeing these totally inadequate efforts. I should like to warn most earnestly those who are thinking in terms of having statues not to take any hasty decisions and to await a full consideration of this question by the National Memorial Committee under the chairmanship of the Congress President.54

This intervention was a pronounced attempt again by the new prime minister to reassert the authority and sovereignty of the state in public spaces. This speaks of the distance between the Nehruvian executive and its secular logic and the vernacularization of commemoration, grief and memorialization in a different cultural register. The Congress High Command tried to discipline the ways in which Gandhi was remembered, Nehru deploring temples, statues and other memorial shrines which would ‘savour of idolatry’ being erected all over the country. Nevertheless, public expressions of grief were outrunning the ‘authoritative’ versions of public commemoration.55 These events also worked as the end of an era. There was closure on the nationalist struggle which was associated with Gandhi more 52

SWJN, 2nd series, Vol. 6, pp. x. Letter to Pant, 18 June, 1948. SWJN, 2nd series, Vol. 5, pp. 45–46. Undated note accepted by the cabinet on 3 February, 1948. 54 SWJN, 2nd series, Vol. 5, p. 66. Statement to the press, 25 February, 1948. 55 SWJN, 2nd series, Vol. 5, p. 66. Statement to the press, 25 February, 1948. 53

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than with any other human being. As P. Sitaramayya, a future All India Congress president, stated in his tribute in an All India Radio broadcast in early February 1948: Mahatma Gandhi had finished his task and while the world will mourn his loss, by no means premature but altogether unnatural, we must recognise that as an ‘avatar’ that has finished his task has no place anymore in the domain of his functioning. . . . He is the tenth avatar that has descended into the world in this age of kali to make dharma walk on two legs. Indeed since June last year Mahatma Gandhi had reason to feel that he was outliving his need and that the gulf between his concept of society and policy and the accepted concepts around him was widening. The avatars in the past met with such a crisis on the eve of their nirvana.56

This reflected a widespread sense that Gandhi’s death had completed his work. His death marked a temporal shift and underscored transitions from colonialism to post-colonialism in the profoundest sense. A most compelling question is to what extent Gandhi himself may have anticipated this, or even had a death-wish, as Ashis Nandy has speculated. In this light, Nehru’s observation that ‘Even in his death there was a magnificence and complete artistry’ could not be more fitting.57 In this way it was not only the grief which accompanied Gandhi’s death which made it a seminal moment in the foundation of the Indian state’s legitimacy, but the sheer fact of his death. Whether it was mourned, celebrated, or discussed as a legal case or as a source of conspiracy theories and intrigues, indifference to such an event was impossible and the shared experience of his death developed a new sense of Indian-ness. Spatially this gap between citizens and state was narrowed by the close connections between the capital, New Delhi and the transmission by radio, newspaper and film of the rituals which were taking place across the country (and within the new country’s borders) and then, later, of the trial of Nathuram Godse. Today this point is upheld by ‘Gandhi’s prominence in local memories of independence and partition’ and, as Peter Gottschalk has described in his fieldwork probing contemporary memories of Gandhi’s death, ‘the ubiquitous 56

Times of India, 5 February, 1948. SWJN, 2nd series, Vol. 5, p. 48. Written on 5 February and published in Harijan, 15 February, 1948. This also poses questions about the political culture of assassination in South Asia more generally, which could be explored further in relation to members of the Bhutto and Nehru-Gandhi dynasties. 57

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description by Arampur residents of Gandhi as rashtrapita (father of the nation) demonstrates the determination and success of the state to craft a memory that recognizes independence as both continuous with a venerable past and discontinuous with foreign domination’.58

Conclusion Distinguishing mourning from the rituals through which this mourning was enacted is not possible. However, the materiality of Gandhi’s memorialization is surely not insignificant. Public and ritualized responses to Gandhi’s death enabled the state to attempt to demarcate the extent of its power. The grey and poorly delineated legacies of citizenship, of marking out who was an Indian or a Pakistani and where borders lay, was complex and lasted for many years after Independence. But Gandhi’s death was a critical moment at which Indian-state-ness was graphically inscribed by the Congress. The rituals following Gandhi’s death also performed a critical bridging function between the state and the people. It enabled the reassertion of nation-state legitimacy in a new form at a time when the pluralistic and liberal legal framework of India’s future constitution was far from assured. This was a collision-moment of the public and private, of state and society and an entanglement of the past and the future. It marked not simply the de-legitimization of the right and extremist forces but the actual legitimization, or at least nominal acceptance of, the new authority of the post-Partition, Congress-led, state. This state was both a spatial geographical settlement and centre of sovereign authority. This may have remained a Congress aspiration rather than a reality in places, and other lower order legitimacies continued to compete for power. Yet there is evidence of a sharp reduction in inter-ethnic violence and a greater acceptance of the secular message of the state immediately after Gandhi’s death. The rituals following Gandhi’s death contained all the collective emotional resonance, inner contradictions and localized interpretations of a Gandhian movement staged in colonial times alongside the sanction and support (rather than resistance of) the governmental machinery of the state.

58 Peter Gottschalk, ‘A Mahatma for Mourners and Militants: the social memories of Mohandas Gandhi in Arampur’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, Vol. 25, No. 1 (2005), p. 56.

C Cambridge University Press 2010 Modern Asian Studies 45, 1 (2011) pp. 81–107.  doi:10.1017/S0026749X10000326

Migration, Citizenship and Belonging in Hyderabad (Deccan), 1946–1956∗ TAYLOR C. SHERM AN International History Department, London School of Economics and Political Science, Houghton Street, London WC2A 2AE, UK Email: [email protected]

Abstract Whilst the history of the Indian diaspora after independence has been the subject of much scholarly attention, very little is known about nonIndian migrants in India. This paper traces the fate of Arabs, Afghans and other Muslim migrants after the forcible integration of the princely state of Hyderabad into the Indian Union in 1948. Because these non-Indian Muslims were doubly marked as outsiders by virtue of their foreign birth and their religious affiliation, the government of India wished to deport these men and their families. But the attempt to repatriate these people floundered on both political and legal shoals. In the process, many were left legally stateless. Nonetheless, migrants were able to creatively change the way they self-identified both to circumvent immigration controls and to secure greater privileges within India.

Introduction The middle of the twentieth century witnessed a transition from an era which was characterized by the relatively free movement of people within the British Empire to a period in which postcolonial nationstates attempted to control flows of migrants more closely. This change left migrants across the former British Empire in an anomalous and often disadvantaged position: Indians in South Africa had limited political rights; the bulk of Indians in Ceylon acquired the nationality of neither India nor Ceylon; Indians resident in Burma who did not ∗ This research has been generously funded by the UK’s Arts & Humanities Research Council. I would like to thank Eleanor Newbigin and Omar Khalidi for their comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

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wish to become Burmese citizens after independence there were made to register and apply for permits to stay; South Asians in Malaya who left the country after independence in 1957 risked being refused reentry.1 At some point in the early postcolonial period many of these countries experienced what might be called a crisis of citizenship, in which the breaking of imperial bonds of migration, trade and finance was proffered as the solution to a wide variety of postcolonial ills. Thus, General Ne Win put pressure on Indians to leave Burma in 1962,2 Kenya placed restrictions on the rights of Indians in the late 1960s,3 and Idi Amin expelled Asians from Uganda in 1972.4 Much less is known, however, about the fortunes of people of non-Indian origin in India.5 The following pages track the fate of Arabs, Afghans and other groups of Muslim migrants in Hyderabad after this princely state was forcibly integrated into the Indian Union in September 1948. In the interregnum between independence and the introduction of the Indian Constitution on 26 January, 1950, the government of India took practical steps to ensure that the actual movement of people into India was restricted.6 This included the introduction of permits and, later, passports for those travelling between Pakistan and India.7 Moreover, shortly after independence Afghans in India were required to be in possession of passports.8 In Hyderabad the Military Governor and the unelected ministry sought to send many people of non-Indian origin to their ‘home’ countries. This paper tracks the government of India’s plan to repatriate these men and their families and makes three main arguments. First, it suggests that, for India, the shift from empire to nation-state was 1 Hugh Tinker, ‘Indians Abroad: Emigration, Restriction and Rejection’ in Michael Twaddle (ed.), Expulsion of a Minority: Essays on Ugandan Asians (London: The Athlone Press for the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, University of London, 1975), pp. 15– 29. 2 Ibid. 3 Daniel Rothchild, ‘Kenya’s Minorities and the African Crisis over Citizenship’, Race (London), vol. 9, no. 4 (1968), pp. 421–37. 4 Twaddle, Expulsion of a Minority. 5 cf. Ellen Oxfeld, Blood, Sweat and Mahjong: Family and Enterprise in an Overseas Chinese Community (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993). 6 Joya Chatterji, ‘Partition, Migration and Citizenship in South Asia, 1946–2006’ paper presented at workshop, From Subjects to Citizens (4 September 2008). 7 Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar, The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia: Refugees, Boundaries, Histories (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), Chapters 3 and 5. 8 Departmental note by B. K. Kapur, 19 May, 1948, National Archives of India (hereafter NAI), Ministry of States (hereafter MoS), f.59-H/48.

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complicated not only by the huge migrations of partition, but by the presence of significant numbers of Indians in other British colonies and migrants from the Empire in India. This meant that the government of India’s calculations about its citizens were never confined within the country’s boundaries. Of course, India was not unique in this respect. Just as other historians have suggested, this research argues that the fact of migration was central to the process by which the Indian nation was demarcated.9 However, and this is the second argument, formal legal questions of citizenship and residency were reliant upon more informal, on the ground negotiations over the meaning of nationality and the nature of belonging. The shift towards a world of nation-states precipitated the emergence of a legal regime governing nationality in former British colonies that often conflicted with precisely those ethnic conceptions of belonging that had given rise to the demand for independence in the first place. In principle, this new legal framework required documentary evidence to prove one’s citizenship, including birth certificates and passports, in order to establish the right to enter a country either for travel or to work.10 Whilst the existing literature places great stress on the importance of this documentary regime, this paper argues that, in practice, the authorities were heavily dependent upon both the self-identification of individuals and the everyday understandings of belonging, even for the production of these documents. Thus, this research engages with scholars who have noted the dissonance between a formal rhetoric of secularism and informal attitudes and practices which excluded Muslims from the Indian nation.11 It extends this particular question to ask whether Muslims of Afghan and Arab origin could hope to retain any sense of belonging in postcolonial India. 9 Radhika Viyas Mongia, ‘Race, Nationality, Mobility: a History of the Passport’, Public Culture, vol. 11, no. 3, (1999), pp. 527–535. 10 This framework had been developing since the nineteenth century. On the history of the passport, and the regulation of migration see, John Torpey, The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship and the State (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2000); Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 11 Gyanendra Pandey, ‘Can a Muslim be an Indian?’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 41, no. 4 (1999), pp. 608–629. More recent work has suggested that even formally secular legal regimes tended to be structured in ways that served the interests of Hindu men, see, Eleanor Newbigin, ‘The Codification of Personal Law and Secular Citizenship: Revisiting the History of Law Reform in Late Colonial India’, Economic and Social History Review, vol. 46, no. 1 (2009), pp. 83–104.

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Third, and finally, the following pages trace the fortunes of individuals who were excluded from India either by informal understandings or legal regimes, but who were also excluded from their so-called ‘home’ countries. Many people whom the authorities wished to deport were simply rejected by their home country because they failed to fulfil the documentary requirements to prove their citizenship. It appears that these men and women were left stateless. But this did not mean that they were rendered helpless or trapped between states. On the contrary, individuals often circumvented immigration controls, changed the way they self-identified for their own ends, and used their alien status to try to better their position in India.

Hyderabad and its place in the imperial economy of migration Notions of nationality and subjecthood within the British Empire had been a rather untidy tangle of local and imperial rules,12 but in practice everyone within the empire (with some important exceptions, including slaves) enjoyed the freedom to live and work anywhere in the realm. Bolstered by an ideology of free trade and the demographic imperative to settle new lands and move labour to where it was needed, the movement of people within the Empire had been largely unrestricted for much of the nineteenth century.13 Later, the free movement of certain people within the empire came to be restricted. Thus, flows of indentured labour from South India were subject to more regulation from the late nineteenth century.14 And the white dominions placed restrictions on Asian immigration from the early twentieth century.15 By the late 1930s, some, though not all, British colonies required passports for entry, but their primary purpose was to keep out various classes of ‘undesirables’, ranging from ‘prostitutes’ and ‘habitual drunkards’ to circus troupes, rather than to restrict 12 Ann Dummett and Andrew Nicol, Subjects, Citizens, Aliens and Others: Nationality and Immigration Law (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1990); Daniel Gorman, Imperial Citizenship: Empire and the Question of Belonging (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006). 13 Randall Hansen, Citizenship and Immigration in Post-war Britain: the Institutional Origins of a Multicultural Nation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 39. For a study of the ideologies behind imperial immigration policy see, Gorman, Imperial Citizenship. 14 Sunil Amrith, ‘Indians Overseas? Governing Tamil Migration to Malaya, 1870– 1941’, Past and Present, vol. 208, no. 1 (2010), pp. 231–261. 15 Marilyn Lake, and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line.

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immigration per se.16 From the 1920s, passports were required for those entering India,17 but the colonial state willingly declined to enforce its own rules, especially on land routes.18 Because colonial authorities often neglected to police their borders, even non-British subjects could enjoy relatively free movement within the British Empire. This meant that it was fairly easy to come to live and work on the subcontinent for those who had the financial means to do so. Hyderabad had long been a desirable destination for migrants from the far reaches of the subcontinent, as well as from Afghanistan, the Arab world and even Southeast Asia. In the late eighteenth century, Hyderabad became a centre of migration for Arabs from the Hadhramaut, who worked as soldiers and scholars in the state.19 In the early part of the nineteenth century, the Nizam of Hyderabad provided refuge for Arab, Rohilla, Sikh and Pathan (Pashtun) mercenaries, whom the British wished to expel after the defeat of the subcontinent’s many warring states, including the Marathas.20 Once in Hyderabad these migrants took up various professions, from trade and moneylending, to employment in the Nizam’s army, or his special Arab irregular forces, the Nazm-i Jamiat, the latter of which exercised watch and ward duties over the palaces of the Nizam and his family. Hyderabad actively recruited immigrants in some cases. When Salar Jung I reorganised the Nizam’s administration in the second half of the nineteenth century, for example, he brought in talented administrators from North India, many of whom had been educated at the Muhammedan Anglo-Oriental College in Aligarh.21 Hyderabad 16 For details on the rules in each colony see, Passport Control Manual, 1939, India Office Records, British Library (hereafter IOR), L/P&J/8/745; Summary of Visa Regulations, January 1947, IOR L/P&J/8/745. 17 Indian Passport Act (XXXIV of 1920), and Passport Rules, 1921, IOR L/P&J/8/736. 18 Deputy Secretary to the Government of India, Foreign & Political Department, to the Chief Secretary to the Government of Burma, the Chief Secretary to the Government of NWFP, His Majesty’s Envoy Extraordinary & Minister Plenipotentiary at the Court of Afghanistan, and the Agent to the Governor General and Chief Commission in Baluchistan, 28 December, 1934, IOR L/P&J/8/736. 19 Omar Khalidi, ‘Sayyids of Hadhramout in Early Modern India’, Asian Journal of Social Science vol. 32, no. 3 (2004), pp. 329–345. 20 Omar Khalidi, ‘The Hadhrami Role in the Politics and Society of Colonial India, 1750s–1950s’ in Ulrike Freitag and William G. Clarence-Smith (eds), Hadhrami Traders, Scholars and Statesmen in the Indian Ocean, 1750s–1960s (Leiden: Brill, 1997), pp. 67–81. 21 Francis Robinson, Separatism Among Indian Muslims: the Politics of the United Provinces’ Muslims 1860–1923 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 26, 123–124.

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State thus accumulated a significant population of Afghans, Arabs, and North Indians.22 Many migrants adopted Urdu as their language and married locally, and their mixed descendents added yet more diversity to Hyderabad’s population. In addition to these Muslim migrants, the Nizam’s government also welcomed Kamma settlers from the Telugu-speaking areas of Madras to bring uncultivated lands in Telangana under the plough.23 At the same time, migrants did not all move in one direction: a considerable number of weavers left the state in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to settle in the main weaving centres of Bombay province where demand for their goods was higher.24 As a result, Hyderabad had become a rather cosmopolitan place: its mixed population was supported by an official ideology epitomized by Hyderabad’s court and nobility, which were famed for their inclusiveness.25 This did not mean that Hyderabad’s population lived in perpetual harmony; this mix did suffer occasional crises. Hyderabadis protested against the entry of outsiders, or ‘non-mulkis’, into the services after Salar Jung I recruited North Indians into the administration.26 In the 1850s, Arabs were deemed to be a ‘menace’ for their alleged involvement in money-lending and the violence which often accompanied the collection of loans. Hyderabadi and British authorities combined to stem the problem: the British restricted the entry of Arabs at the port of Bombay, and Salar Jung I established a special court (Qadat-i Urub) to deal with cases involving Arabs.27 Nearly a century later, after the Second World War, Arabs again found themselves unwelcome in the state. The Nizam’s government asked the British for permission to extern Arabs from the state, not only because of 22 See, Omar Khalidi, Muslims in the Deccan: a Historical Survey (New Delhi: Global Media Publications, 2006). 23 A. Satyanarayana, ‘A Note on Land, Caste and the “Settler” in Telangana’ in S. Simhadri and P. L. Vishweshwer Rao (eds), Telangana: Dimensions of Underdevelopment (Hyderabad: Centre for Telangana Studies, 1997), pp. 30–34; and Inukonda Thirumali, Against Dora and Nizam: People’s Movement in Telangana (New Delhi: Kanishka Publishers, 2003). 24 Douglas Haynes, and Tirthankar Roy, ‘Conceiving Mobility: Weavers’ Migrations in Pre-Colonial and Colonial India’, Indian Economic and Social History Review, vol. 36, no. 1, (1999), pp. 35–67. 25 Karen Leonard, ‘The Hyderabad Political System and its Participants’, The Journal of Asian Studies vol. 30, no. 3 (1971), pp. 569–582. 26 Karen Leonard, ‘Hyderabad: the Mulki non-Mulki Conflict’ in Robin Jeffrey (ed.), People, Princes and Paramount Power: Society and Politics in the Indian Princely States (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1978), pp. 65–106. 27 Khalidi, ‘Hadhrami Role in the Politics and Society of Colonial India’, pp. 76–77.

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their alleged involvement in money-lending and drug use, but because some members of the Nazm-i Jamiat had come into conflict with the dominant political force in the state, the Ittehadul Muslimin.28

Independence, partition and Hyderabad In 1947, as India and Pakistan gained independence, the princely states were left in legal and political limbo.29 Hyderabad, like Kashmir, chose not to join either of the two dominions.30 As the Nizam’s government tried to negotiate its way out of joining the Indian Union, Hyderabad’s cosmopolitan society faced several crises, from a communist insurgency to the rising militancy of the Razakars, who promoted Muslim rule in the state. Although Hyderabad was not disconnected from developments in the rest of the subcontinent, its politics had not crystallized along religious lines in the way that all-India politics did in the months surrounding August 1947. But as strife within Hyderabad escalated, the state was drawn into a discursive interpretation of all-India politics which was dominated by the experience of partition. Hyderabad’s nascent internal politics were fragmented along linguistic, caste and religious lines, but the state’s political divisions did not directly correspond to those in the rest of India. Linguistic affinities tended to define the major parties in the state, with separate organizations for Kannada speakers and Marathi speakers, whilst in the Telugu-speaking areas in the east of the State, the Andhra Maha Sabha, with its communist agenda, was the dominant political force. During the war, the communists in Telangana had begun an insurgency against landlords and the forces of the Nizam that continued after 1947.31 For its part, the Hyderabad State Congress had pretensions to unite the entire state, but in effect its three

28 Extract from a secret note from W. V. Grigson, Revenue and Police Member, H.E.H. the Nizam’s Executive Council, Hyderabad, [undated], NAI, MoS, f.117P(S)/47. 29 Ian Copland, ‘Lord Mountbatten and the Integration of the Indian States: A Reappraisal’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, vol. 21, no. 2 (1993), pp. 385– 408. 30 On the failed negotiations to bring Hyderabad into the Indian Union see, Lucien D. Benichou, From Autocracy to Integration: Political Developments in Hyderabad State (1938– 1948), (Chennai: Orient Longman, 2000), Chapter 6. 31 Thirumali, Against Dora and Nizam.

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linguistic groups operated in relative autonomy from one another. When the Nizam failed to accede to India by 15 August, 1947, the Hyderabad State Congress launched a campaign designed to force the Nizam to join the Indian Union that included both non-violent protest and anti-government acts of violence.32 Language was not the only fault line in Hyderabadi politics, however. By 1947 the Hyderabad State Congress and the Andhra Maha Sabha were demanding that the Nizam accede to the Indian Union. But both the main dalit parties, the Depressed Classes Association and the Depressed Classes Conference, had declared that they wished to stay out of the Union in order to avoid being dominated by caste Hindus. Finally, there was the Majlis-i Ittehadul Muslimin, which had been established in 1927 and claimed to represent the interests of Hyderabad’s Muslim population. At its inception, the Ittehad had criticized the Nizam’s rule, and pushed for more representative government, but on the basis that Muslims should rule Hyderabad. By 1947, the party held significant influence over the Nizam. At partition, the party supported both the creation of Pakistan and the idea that Hyderabad should stay out of the Indian Union.33 As communists and nationalists stepped up their own campaigns, the Ittehad’s paramilitary volunteers, the Razakars, set about realising the Ittehad’s pro-Muslim agenda with aggression against anyone whom they considered to be an enemy of the regime. Of course, not all Muslims were united, let alone united in support of the Ittehad: both nationalists and communists counted Muslims amongst their ranks, and there had been fighting between members of the Arab Nazm-i Jamiat and members of the Ittehad.34 These squabbles were the source of the attempt to deport Arabs, as cited above. Furthermore, many government servants saw the spike in Muslim-chauvinist sentiment inspired by the Ittehad and the Razakars as a betrayal, not only of Hyderabad’s cosmopolitan ethos, but also of Islam.35

32 Swami Ramananda Tirtha, Memoirs of Hyderabad Freedom Struggle (Bombay: Popular Prakashan, 1967), pp. 176–187. 33 Carolyn M. Elliott, ‘Decline of a Patrominal Regime: The Telengana Rebellion in India, 1946–1951’, The Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 34, no. 1 (1974), pp. 27–47, especially p. 35. 34 Extract from a secret note from W. V. Grigson, Revenue and Police Member, H.E.H. the Nizam’s Executive Council, Hyderabad, [undated], NAI, Ministry of States, f.117-P(S)/47. 35 Fareed Mirza, Tehsildar, to the First Taluqdar, Nander District, 15 July, 1948, NAI, MoS, f.104-H/48.

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Although the fault lines in Hyderabad’s many internal conflicts did not run neatly along religious lines, Hyderabad’s political situation nonetheless came to be seen through the same lens as the disturbances of partition in North India. The structure of rule in the state, where a predominantly-Muslim government held power over large numbers of the disadvantaged, many of whom were Muslim, but the majority of whom were Hindu, appeared to divide the population along religious lines. This was especially so as the Nizam’s forces, who were mostly Muslim, descended to suppress the communists and nationalists, the bulk of whom were Hindu. In addition, two short-term trends increased the perception in New Delhi that Hyderabad was a state run by Muslims for Muslims. Firstly, the Ittehad and the Razakars, who wished Hyderabad to avoid accession to the Indian Union consciously remoulded Hyderabad’s image into that of a Muslim State. They attempted to recruit men from across the Muslim world to fight to protect Hyderabad’s ‘Muslim State against the invasion of Hindus’.36 According to Indian Government documents, former members of Hyderabad’s army were sent to Afghanistan and to Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province (NWFP) to recruit forces to protect the state.37 In turn, the government of Bombay refused entry to men from the Frontier and the Hadhramaut on the ground that they were expected to travel to Hyderabad in order to enlist in the Nizam’s forces.38 Secondly, thousands of Indian Muslims sought the protection of the Nizam during the violence of partition. The Nizam’s Palace in New Delhi was used to house more than 1,500 Muslims who had sought shelter from the violence which engulfed the capital in September 1947.39 And several hundred thousand Muslims left India and established themselves in Hyderabad, especially in Hyderabad City.40

36 D. K. Krishna, Assistant Director (States), Intelligence Bureau, Ministry of Home Affairs to V. P. Menon, Ministry of States, 25 May, 1948, NAI, MoS, f.59-H/48. 37 Government of Central Provinces to Ministry of Foreign Affairs, New Delhi, 25 May, 1948, NAI, MoS, f.59-H/48. 38 Copy of telegram from Restis, Bombay to Homex, New Delhi, 9 April, 1948, NAI, MoS, f.198-P/48; Secretary to the Government of Bombay, Home Department to the Secretary to the Government of India, Ministry of States, 7 August, 1948, NAI, MoS, f.59-H/48. 39 The Superintendent, H.E.H. the Nizam’s Palace, New Delhi, to the Political Secretary, H.E.H. the Nizam’s Government, Hyderabad Deccan, 25 November, 1947, APSA, Installment no. 70, list no. 6, serial no. 53. 40 Government estimates put the number of North Indian refugees in Hyderabad at around seven lakhs, Note by Raja Dhondi Raj Bahadur, Minister for Rehabilitation, 5 August, 1949, NAI, MoS, f.10(27)/49.

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As the Nizam’s forces bore down more heavily on their opponents in Hyderabad, and non-Hyderabadi Muslims gathered in the state, the territory was drawn into an all-India narrative of partition. Although each locality, indeed, each person, experienced partition in a unique way, as Pandey has shown, these separate instances of violence were often given larger significance as they were transposed into events of national suffering. Thus, individual acts of violence became national wrongs and entire communities were rendered undifferentiated and suspect.41 The catastrophe of partition produced a postcolonial polity in which political parties organized around Muslim interests were almost completely discredited, and the loyalty of Muslims in India was easily cast in doubt. These views informed the government of India’s treatment of Muslims who wished to return to or remain in India after partition.42 They also shaped the treatment of Muslims amongst communities of overseas Indians in the remaining British colonies, including Kenya.43 They certainly coloured interpretations of the situation in Hyderabad, for the government of India concluded that the unrest in Hyderabad threatened to destabilize ‘the communal situation in the whole of India’, and decided to invade the state to restore order.44 On 12 September, 1948, therefore, the government of India launched its ‘Police Action’ in Hyderabad. In spite of the name, the move really entailed a full scale military invasion of the state. Although the formal invasion was concluded very quickly, the state witnessed widespread anti-Muslim violence in its aftermath.

The official view of Afghans, Arabs and Pakistanis—Razakars and outsiders The fact that Hyderabad had been woven into that all-India partition narrative by September 1948 was important because it informed the way the government of India and the Military Governor in Hyderabad viewed questions of belonging in the state after the invasion. Thus, 41 Gyanendra Pandey, Remembering Partition: Violence, Nationalism and History in India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), Chapter 5. 42 Zamindar, The Long Partition, especially Chapter 3. 43 Deborah Sutton, ‘Divided and Uncertain Loyalties: Partition, Indian Sovereignty and Contested Citizenship in East Africa, 1948–1955’, Interventions vol. 9, no. 2 (2007), pp. 276–288. 44 Note for the Cabinet by V. P. Menon, Secretary to the Government of India, Ministry of States, May 1948, NAI, MoS, f.1(6) H, 1948.

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there was widespread distrust of Muslims in Hyderabad as Major General J. N. Chaudhuri led Indian troops into the territory. As Military Governor, Chaudhuri wanted to rid the state of nonindigenous Muslims. There was a remarkable absence of debate in government over whether this policy was legally permissible. Indeed, in the lack of legal clarity which prevailed at the time, the idea that non-indigenous Muslims may have had rights to residence or even citizenship in India was not raised. Instead, everyday understandings of belonging determined the fate of these men and their families. Suspicion of Muslims dominated the Military Governor’s policy from the inception of the occupation. As they swept into the state, Chaudhuri’s forces arrested thousands of people: the Nizam’s military forces were detained as they surrendered, and approximately 17,000 civilians were imprisoned on suspicion that they were engaged in anti-Union activities. Chaudhuri explained, ‘Naturally, among those arrested, the majority were Muslims . . . They had been pointed out as Razakars by people who were, at that time, considered reliable’.45 In the post-invasion lexicon, the term Razakar did not necessarily denote only those who were members of the volunteer corps. Rather, it was widely used to describe anyone suspected of Muslim chauvinism or of opposition to the integration of Hyderabad into the Indian Union. As Chaudhuri’s observation makes clear, it was widely assumed— incorrectly—that most Muslims were Razakars. By one non-official estimate, as many as 25,000 Arabs were jailed in the aftermath of the invasion.46 A separate non-official source suggested that around 2,500 Afghans were also held.47 According to government figures around 6,22548 people described as ‘Pakistani nationals’, who had worked not only in the Nizam’s forces but as petty traders, shopkeepers, money-lenders, masons and mechanics, were also detained in various camps around the State.49 The latter is a particularly curious category given that the legal regime regarding 45 J. N. Chaudhuri, Military Governor, to the Deputy Secretary to the Government of India, Ministry of States, 17 February, 1949, NAI, MoS, f.12(4)-H/49. 46 Note by Saif bin Sultan Husein bin Abdulla bin Umar Al Quaiti, LLM, MA, [undated], National Archives UK, DO 142/441. 47 Translation of cutting from Afghan (Karachi), 10 February, 1949, NAI, MoS, f.12(4)-H/49. 48 Minutes of a discussion held in the Ministry of External Affairs, Government of India, with regard to the question of the repatriation of Pakistan Nationals from Hyderabad (Deccan), [undated], NAI, MoS, f.10(12)-H/49. 49 Note by Jagat Singh, Ministry of External Affairs, 18 April, 1949, NAI, MoS, f.10(12)-H/49.

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nationality was anything but clear at this time. The Military Governor argued that it was ‘absolutely necessary to get rid of the Pathan and Arab outsiders in Hyderabad as quickly as possible’.50 His Government, in co-ordination with the central government, decided to deport these men to their countries of origin. By one estimate there were around 21,000 people to be deported,51 and most would have to be kept in detention camps until they could be escorted from the country. As they were awaiting deportation, their families were also detained. At this time, women and children under the age of 16 did not have separate rights of nationality or domicile in international law. Instead, their rights were legally bound to those of their husband or father. Thus, the government made plans to deport the Indian-born wives and children of these migrants. In the meantime, the men and their families were held in detention camps, behind barbed wire and under armed guard.52 Within a short time, many in the camps had spent all their ready cash and were in dire straights. One group of former members of the Nizam’s forces who were waiting to be sent to Pakistan lamented that, ‘We have no clothes to cover ourselves and we have no money to look after the other personal necessaries of life’. They decried the conditions of the camp, writing, ‘The ladies are in a very depressed state and shocked at their imprisonment in a barbedwire fence and separated from their husbands. . .The future of our children is being ruined recklessly, as we are unable to educate them.’53 Chaudhuri, acknowledging the poor conditions in the camp, told the Centre, ‘morale in Dhond camp [is] extremely low’, and he urged the government of India to expedite the removal of the detainees.54 As it became clear that Indian forces had acted with excessive zeal in detaining these Muslims on the assumption that they were Razakars, new rationales were developed for their detention and removal from the state. Writing of the Afghans, Chaudhuri stressed the fact that,

50 Foreign New Delhi to the Chief Secretary to the Government of Bombay, 14 October, 1948, NAI, MoS, f.175-H/48. 51 Southern Command Adm. Instr. no. 50, Repatriation Camp Dhond, 8 October, 1948, NAI, MoS, f.175-H/48. 52 Milgov Hyderabad State to Foreign New Delhi, 16 March, 1949 (received), NAI, MoS, f.10(12)-H/49. 53 Q. Bahadur, Hav/Cl 8th Hyderabad Infantry and 21 others to the Military Governor, Hyderabad, 19 March, 1949, NAI, Ministry of States, f.10(12)-H/49. 54 Milgov Hyderabad State to Foreign New Delhi, 16 March, 1949 (received), NAI, MoS, f.10(12)-H/49.

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‘Afghan nationals here live mostly by money-lending’. The Military Governor was willing to acknowledge that, ‘Though perhaps a greater proportion of them did not take much part in the Razakar movement’, he nonetheless insisted that, ‘some of them definitely did, while others naturally used the Muslim domination obtaining at the time for their own ends. As a result, they were possibly not the most popular community in Hyderabad’.55 Even this new rationale—their unpopularity as moneylenders—was not based on solid evidence, as many Afghans were in fact businessmen and landholders.56 Similarly, the Government in Delhi justified the removal of Arabs on the grounds that, after having lost their jobs as the Nizam’s forces were disbanded, many Arabs were unemployed, ‘without any means of livelihood and with no prospect of future employment’. This, they reasoned, ‘would constitute a constant threat to the law and order position in the state’.57 The legal rights of those being held awaiting deportation were unclear as the legal regime establishing citizenship and domicile rights was in flux in the subcontinent, especially for individuals residing in princely states. Before the introduction of the Constitutional provisions regarding citizenship on 26 November, 1949 (two months before the rest of the constitution) the old British Nationality and Status of Aliens Act continued to apply in independent India, ensuring that those in the former territories of British India remained British subjects after the British had departed.58 The residents of princely states, however, had not been British subjects, but rather, had been British Protected Persons. They were, therefore, not covered by the interim arrangements made for British India. When British suzerainty over the princely states terminated on 15 August, 1947, residents of princely states ceased to be British Protected Persons. The government of Hyderabad did issue its own passports for a very brief time between independence and the police action, but these were not recognized

55 J. N. Chaudhuri to N. M. Buch, Joint Secretary to the Government of India, Ministry of States, 5 March, 1949, NAI, MoS, f.12(4)-H/49. 56 Note by B. K Kapur, Ministry of External Affairs, 17 February, 1949, NAI, MoS, f.12(4)-H/49. 57 Note by S. Narayanaswamy, Deputy Secretary to the Government of India, Ministry of States, 18 November, 1948, NAI, MoS, f.175-H/48. 58 S. K. Agrawala and M. Koteswara Rao, ‘Nationality and International Law in Indian Perspective’ in Ko Swan Sik (ed.), Nationality and International Law in Asian Perspective (London: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1990), pp. 65–123, especially p. 71.

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by the government of India.59 When India invaded Hyderabad, the people of the state did not automatically become Indian citizens. It was not until the Citizenship Act of 1955 that persons belonging to princely states were formally made citizens of India.60 The court cases that retrospectively clarified what status individuals had before the commencement of the constitution or the introduction of the Citizenship Act were not heard until as late as 1955,61 meaning that in the period immediately after the police action, the legal status of the people of Hyderabad, including those in detention, was uncertain. At this stage, therefore, formal legal rules about who had the right to stay in India were less significant than ad hoc notions about who belonged in India. In the reasoning of Chaudhuri and the central government, it was easy to slide from more narrow considerations of citizenship and residency, which centred on the question of loyalty, to the idea that persons—or to be accurate, Muslims—who were involved in certain professions or who were unemployed did not belong in India. Moreover, this understanding was collective: at this stage, there was no assessment of the merits of individual Afghans or Arabs—they were judged as a whole. These ad hoc assessments were, however, open to negotiation. Representatives of the Arabs who were detained argued that they did not deserve to be imprisoned or deported. They produced evidence that Arabs, too, had been victims of Razakar attacks before September 1948, and that they had condemned the excesses of the Razakars and Majlis-i Ittehadul Muslimin.62 The Nazm-i Jamiat, they protested, had not engaged in the same activities as the Nizam’s other forces, but had ‘served the good cause of the public without any distinction of caste or creed.’63 And they asked to be given a status analogous to that of Indians in South Africa. Largely with the help of General El Edroos, head of the Hyderabad Army, who was himself of Arab origin, Chaudhuri was persuaded to allow Arabs ‘who have settled down

59 S. Narayanswamy, Deputy Secretary to the Government of India, Ministry of States, to the Ministry of Home Affairs, 27 May, 1948, NAI, MoS, f.75(2)-G/Hyd/48. 60 B. N. Rau, India’s Constitution in the Making (Calcutta: Orient Longmans, 1960), p. 338. 61 Agrawala and Rao, ‘Nationality and International Law’, pp. 99–104. 62 Resolution of the Arabs of Jalsa against the Razakars, 21 February, 1945, National Archives UK, DO 142/441. 63 Shaiks, etc. and representatives of the Arabs in Hyderabad to Major General J. N. Chowdary [sic], Military Governor, Hyderabad, 7 November, 1948, National Archives UK, DO 142/441.

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permanently in the State as peaceful citizens’ to stay, even though they were ‘of non-Indian origin’.64 With El Edroos’ intervention several thousand Arab families were permitted to remain in Hyderabad. This, too, had less to do with rights of residence or citizenship than with an informal understanding between two military men.

Repatriation and reciprocity The Indian Government had originally proposed that detainees be repatriated to their ‘home’ states without consultation with the governments of Afghanistan, Pakistan, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia or Aden. But the detention and proposed deportation raised the prospect that any action to dispel these people would have unpleasant consequences for Indian communities overseas. Scholars have remarked upon the fact that the Congress and the government of independent India, which the party led, seemed willing neither to completely abandon nor unconditionally accept overseas Indians.65 The government of India ensured that commissioners were stationed in British colonies with significant Indian populations, a move which implied that it was unwilling to relinquish the influence it held over these Indians abroad.66 And yet, Nehru personally urged overseas Indians to take the citizenship of the place where they resided, and warned them that they should not expect aid from ‘Mother India’.67 Unable to absorb more people after the influx of refugees from partition, the government of India was eager to ensure that Indians overseas did not have any reason to return. The presence of Indians overseas, therefore, forced the government to rethink questions of belonging in India itself. There were clear indications in the press that the security of Indians overseas may have been imperilled if Arabs and Afghans were forcibly deported from Hyderabad. The Karachi-based newspaper, 64 Note by S. Narayanaswamy, Deputy Secretary to the Government of India, Ministry of States, 18 November, 1948, NAI, MoS, f.175-H/48. 65 Sutton, ‘Divided and Uncertain’, John D. Kelly and Martha Kaplan, ‘Diaspora and Swaraj, Swaraj and Diaspora’ in Dipesh Chakrabarty and Rochona Majumdar (eds), From the Colonial to the Postcolonial: India and Pakistan in Transition (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 311–331. 66 Tinker, ‘Indians Abroad’, pp. 24–25. 67 Anirudha Gupta, ‘India and the Asians in East Africa’, in Twaddle, Expulsion of a Minority, pp. 125–139, especially p. 128.

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Afghan, contrasted the proposed deportation of Afghans from India with the fact that during the unrest surrounding partition in NWFP, ‘thousands of Hindus and Sikhs took shelter in the Holy Land of Afghanistan’, and were helped, ‘materially and morally’ whilst there. The paper protested, ‘we have no intention that we should incite the feelings of the Afghan brothers to avenge Hindus and Sikhs residing in Afghanistan. ‘But’, the paper continued in a sarcastic tone, ‘it is our desire that our Afghan brothers should know the result of our kindness and brotherly attitude towards Hindus and Sikhs’.68 The Al Nahda newspaper in Aden published a letter addressing the Commission for India in Aden warning that, ‘feeling in Aden and all the Arab world has turned against you because of the worst treatment and brutal action you have taken against the Arabs of Hyderabad especially against the old and the children.’ Implying retaliation was not inconceivable, the letter noted, ‘Hindus in Aden have lived a peaceful life in Aden among the Arabs for a long time’. The paper asked the Commission to allow the Arabs in Hyderabad to live ‘in the same way as the Hindus do in Aden’.69 The implication was that the fate of the two immigrant groups was tied, and that if Arabs were expelled from Hyderabad, Hindus may be forced to leave Aden. Seeing the displeasure which the prospect of deportation had incurred abroad, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs fretted that forced repatriation without consultation would be ‘bound to strain the relations’ between India and these other governments. Above all, the position of Indians in South Africa was a ‘very important consideration’, according to the Ministry of External Affairs: There is open talk in South Africa now of the repatriation of persons of Indian origin to India. If the Government of India were to resort to a forced repatriation of a large number of persons of non-Indian origin without any reference to the Governments of the countries concerned, it is bound to be quoted as a precedent against us in any future protest against repatriation of Indians from South Africa.70

68 Translation of cutting from Afghan (Karachi), 11 February, 1949, NAI, MoS, f.12(4)-H/49. 69 Translation of letter addressed to the Commission for the Bharat Government in Aden, Al Nahda, enclosed in a letter from A. B. Commissioner for the Government of India, Aden, to the Secretary to the Government of India, Ministry of External Affairs, 1 December, 1950, NAI, MoS, f.19(5)-H/50. 70 Note by S. Dutt, Ministry of External Affairs, 15 December, 1948, NAI, MoS, f.175-H/48.

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As a result, the deportations had to be delayed as the government of India consulted the home governments of these families. Here we can see that questions of citizenship and belonging in India were not easily confined within India’s borders. Of course, historians have long remarked upon the fact that notions of citizenship in India were shaped by the experience of partition and the creation of Pakistan. But the present research suggests that, although the government of India had an ambivalent relationship with Indians abroad, it was unable to ignore them when considering questions of citizenship and domicile within India. Because the treatment of aliens is so often reciprocal in international law, the presence of Indians overseas affected the treatment of non-Indians within India’s borders.

Negotiating citizenship Negotiated deportation, in turn, ran into difficulties because it took place in the midst of a larger transition. The era of decolonization witnessed the inception of a shift from an imperial regime, in which persons could move relatively freely within the British Empire without much documentation, to an international one that demanded individuals provide documentary evidence to prove their citizenship. But the emerging legal framework for governing nationality did not square neatly with equally contemporary, but not necessarily complementary, conceptions of nationality based on ethnicity. This meant that persons who identified themselves (or were identified by others) as Arab or Afghan did not necessarily meet the legal requirements to be recognized as nationals of their ‘home’ countries. Legal questions were not the only hurdle: the attempt to remove these ‘outsiders’ also foundered on the government of India’s larger political concerns, especially the struggle over Kashmir. Negotiations over repatriating Afghans in Hyderabad quickly turned on the tensions between India and Pakistan over Kashmir. As soon as the Ministry of External Affairs broached the subject of sending Afghans home, the Afghan Chargé d’Affaires in Delhi warned the government of India against creating ‘a sense of injustice’ rankling in the minds of Afghans in Hyderabad. The Chargé d’Affaires reminded the Ministry of External Affairs that Afghanistan did not wish its own nationals to interfere in Kashmiri affairs, but those deported would have to pass through Pakistan to get to Afghanistan, and ‘if they were to leave Hyderabad in an angry and disgruntled mood they

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would become a prey to Pakistan propaganda’.71 Given the role that Pashtun tribesmen from NWFP in Pakistan had played in escalating the Kashmir conflict, the government of India was particularly keen to avoid the possibility of adding Afghans to those fighting in Kashmir.72 The Afghan government agreed that men who had been in the Nizam’s forces and ‘who had obviously no means of livelihood’ ought to be returned, but asked ‘for special consideration for Afghan nationals who had been coming to and living in India for scores of years’ to be allowed to continue to ply their trades.73 Indeed, as a sign of his goodwill, the Chargé d’Affaires travelled to Hyderabad to inform Afghans there, ‘about the true relationship between India and Afghanistan, and to emphasize what benefits Afghanistan was receiving from India and generally to persuade them to behave themselves’.74 In return, the Afghan Government persuaded the government of India to significantly alter its plans. As a result, it adopted a policy of releasing all those Afghans ‘who were well off and against whom there was nothing specific’.75 It allowed Afghans being held in camps to return to Hyderabad, and decided not to deport any Afghans from the State except ex-servicemen, those ‘involved or convicted in Razakar activities’76 and those ‘of undesirable character’.77 Chaudhuri, acting as Military Governor, was adamant that this much smaller group should be removed from the State, and asked district police to draw up lists of those to be deported. In total, various police authorities recommended that 30 Afghan families be sent to Afghanistan. However, upon enquiry it was found that, ‘most of the so-called Afghani-Afghan families have been resident in this State for several generations and that all their present members 71 Note by K. P. S. Menon, Ministry of External Affairs, 3 November, 1948, NAI, MoS, f.12(4)-H/49. 72 Chitralekha Zutchi, Languages of Belonging: Islam, Regional Identity, and the Making of Kashmir (London: Hurst & Company, 2004), p. 306. 73 Note by B. K. Kapur, Ministry of External Affairs, 17 February, 1949, NAI, MoS, f.12(4)-H/49. 74 Note by K. P. S. Menon, Ministry of External Affairs, 3 November, 1948, NAI, MoS, f.12(4)-H/49. 75 Note by B. K Kapur, Ministry of External Affairs, 22 February, 1949, NAI, MoS, f.12(4)-H/49. 76 Foreign, New Delhi to Military Governor, Hyderabad, 12 March, 1949, NAI, MoS, f.12(4)-H/49. 77 J. N. Chaudhuri to N. M. Buch, Joint Secretary to the Government of India, Ministry of States, 5 March, 1949, NAI, MoS, f.12(4)-H/49.

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are born-Hyderabadis owning extensive landed properties and having business interests in the State, with no corresponding interests in Afghanistan’.78 By the time these enquiries had been completed, the Indian Constitution had come into force. Given that many had been born in Hyderabad, they could claim Indian citizenship rights under the Constitution. In light of this, the government of Hyderabad concluded, ‘Though they may all be of Afghan origin, it will not be possible to give satisfactory proof of their Afghan nationality to the Afghan Government.’ As a result, only five out of 30 families could be forcibly repatriated.79 However, on further enquiry it was found that no member of these remaining five families was in possession of ‘any passport or other travel documents’.80 The government of India asked the government of Afghanistan if they would accept these families, but received no reply.81 Similar difficulties arose when it came to sending Arabs back to their countries of origin. Around three dozen of the Arabs detained in a camp in Hyderabad city claimed to be from Saudi Arabia. The Saudi authorities initially refused to issue the necessary identity certificates to these men and their families. After General El Edroos intervened, the Saudis were persuaded to issue certificates to 13 of them,82 but declined to recognize the rest. The Saudi’s contended ‘that a mere declaration by the Arabs that they are Saudi Arabians is not enough to allow their entry into the country.’ They averred that, ‘The mere existence of a relative in Saudi Arabia does not imply that the applicants themselves are Saudi Arabs’.83 They insisted on ‘more concrete proof’ to establish their claim to Saudi nationality. The remaining men were unable to provide such proof, and the government of Saudi Arabia refused to allow them entry, even on compassionate grounds.84

78 L. C. Jain, General Administration Department, Government of Hyderabad, to S. Narayanaswamy, Deputy Secretary to the Government of India, Ministry of States, 16 February, 1951, NAI, MoS, f.17(14)-H/51. 79 Ibid., emphasis in original. 80 L. G. Rajwade, Chief Secretary to the Government of Hyderabad, General Administration Department, to the Deputy Secretary to the Government of India, Ministry of States, 29 May, 1951, NAI, MoS, f.17(14)-H/51. 81 See several reminder notes in NAI, MoS, f.17(14)-H/51. 82 A. H. Safrani, Under Secretary to the Government of India, Ministry of External Affairs to the Consul for India, Jedda, 3 November, 1950, NAI, MoS, f.19(9)-H/50. 83 A. H. Safrani, Under Secretary to the Government of India, Ministry of External Affairs to the Chief Secretary, Hyderabad Government, 30 January, 1951, NAI, MoS, f.19(9)-H/50. 84 See file, NAI, MoS, f.19(9)-H/50.

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Finally, around 70 Arabs, most of whom had been in the Nazm-i Jamiat and were detained in Hyderabad, reported that they wished to be repatriated back to Indonesia, but this proved no simple task either. Only 14 of these Arabs had a valid Dutch passport, while another 33 had an expired one. Another 28 people, did ‘not possess any passport or travel document issued by the Dutch’.85 India did not expect the Dutch government to oblige their request to consider taking in these men and their dependents, as the government of India had lent its support to Indonesian nationalists in their fight against Dutch colonialism.86 Moreover, the fact that many of the Arabs in Dutch Indonesia had also sided with the Republic would not have provided any more impetus for the Dutch to let them return.87 The Dutch government stalled behind requirements for paperwork, and none of the Arabs had been sent to Indonesia by the time the Dutch recognized the independence of the Republic of Indonesia at the end of 1949. When the new Indonesian government considered their subsequent applications for Indonesian passports, they found that many of those being deported had written on their application forms that their nationality was ‘Arab Mohamadan’.88 Thus, the Indonesian Embassy replied, ‘It is evident from the forms that they are neither Indonesians nor IndonesianArabs, but they are definitely Arabs. Therefore the question of giving them Indonesian passports and repatriating them to Indonesia by my Government, does not arise at all’.89 Indonesia did, however, consent to let these individuals apply for visas, if Hyderabad would issue identity certificates for them. These three examples tell us two things about the regime of legal citizenship based on documentary evidence. First, in the absence of identity papers of any kind, the documentary regime was entirely

85 Military Governor’s Office to the Deputy Secretary to the Government of India, Ministry of States, 9 April, 1949, NAI, MoS, f.10(11)-H/49; Military Governor’s Office to the Deputy Secretary to the Government of India, Ministry of States, 16 April, 1949, NAI, MoS, f.10(11)-H/49. 86 Note by V. M. M. Nair, Ministry of External Affairs, 19 March, 1949, NAI, MoS, f.10(11)-H/49. 87 Huub de Jonge, ‘Abdul Rahman Baswedan and the Emancipation of the Hadhramis in Indonesia’, Asian Journal of Social Science, vol. 32, no. 3 (2004), pp. 373– 400, especially p. 391. 88 Office memorandum, Ministry of External Affairs to the Ministry of States, 27 May, 1950, NAI, MoS, f.10(11)-H/49. 89 B. A. Ubani, Official Secretary to the Embassy of the United States of Indonesia to R. N. Saletore, Under Secretary, Ministry of External Affairs, Government of India, 20 April, 1950, NAI, MoS, f.10(11)-H/49.

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reliant upon the self-identification of individuals. Thus, understandings of citizenship as a legal right gained by residency and established through written records contained within them conceptions of nationality that relied on ethnic origin as a marker of belonging and often directly conflicted with the requirements of the legal regime. When individuals self-identified in a way that did not match legal requirements, as in the case of the men who identified themselves as ‘Arab Mohamadan’, individuals could be left stateless. Indeed, the combination of documentary requirements for citizenship, and the failure of state borders to map perfectly onto imagined nations, had the potential to leave tens of thousands of migrants stateless. Indeed, many of those whom the government of India had wished to deport had no ‘home’ to be sent to, at least not in law. Thus, very few of the ‘undesirable’ Afghans were deported. Similarly, after nearly three years of negotiations with the Saudi government, around two dozen men who claimed to be from Saudi Arabia could not be sent home. The government of Hyderabad was left to conclude, ‘the presence of these 23 persons in Hyderabad is not going to make any difference to the state.’ And they too were released from detention.90 Another 27 Arabs from Indonesia were also freed when their deportation could not be arranged.91 Thus, although the government originally estimated 7,000 Arabs would be deported, less than 2,000 Arabs were formally repatriated.92 Several thousand were left to either resettle in Hyderabad or make their own way out of India.

Self-identification and subversion Although many were unable to fulfil the legal requirements to prove the nationality they claimed, and were technically stateless, this did not mean that they were unable to move. Individuals could and did

90 Note by S. Narayanaswamy, Deputy Secretary to the Government of India, Ministry of States, 21 March, 1952, NAI, MoS, f.17(31)-H/51. 91 S. Narayanaswamy, Deputy Secretary to the Government of India, Ministry of States, to N. N. Iengar, General Administration Department, Government of Hyderabad, 16 February, 1951, NAI, MoS, f.19(59)-H/50; N. N. Iengar, General Administration Department, Government of Hyderabad, to S. Narayanaswamy, Deputy Secretary to the Government of India, Ministry of States, 24 February, 1951, NAI, MoS, f.19(59)-H/50. 92 G. V. Kitson to J. S. H. Shattock, 13 September, 1949, National Archives UK, DO 142/441.

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change the way they self-identified in order to secure a better outcome for themselves. Their eventual departure from India, however, relied upon strategic neglect from India’s governments. Interestingly, the authorities in India seemed willing to subvert the system in order to facilitate the departure of these men and their families. Thus, in some cases detainees were released from camps and allowed to disappear. In other cases, government officers turned a blind eye to individuals who changed the way they self-identified in order to leave India. The creative negotiation of nationality was not limited to those who wished to leave India. Indeed, many of those who remained used their status as non-Indians to gain access to privileges within India. Many migrants simply slipped through or were allowed to evade India’s none-too-tight immigration controls. Thus, it was reported that by the time Indonesia rejected their visa applications, around half of the original population of Arab Indonesians had ‘proceeded to Aden and Java of their own accord’.93 Indeed, several hundred Arabs made their way from Hyderabad to Aden on their own initiative, often by hitching a ride in boats used for the import of dates.94 The government of India was not unaware of their travel. Indeed, the government reportedly issued them with ‘a passport of sorts’ which, it was ordered, would ‘be accepted for exit only’.95 Here officials in India actually helped aliens to circumvent immigration controls. This takes us back to the idea that informal understandings of belonging, as opposed to the strict enforcement of legal rights, were crucial in determining the ultimate ethnic mix of Hyderabad and India. Others who could not be deported simply changed the way they self-identified to their own advantage. For example, the government of Hyderabad wished to send several thousand Arabs to either the Eastern Protectorate or the Western Protectorate of Aden, but the British authorities in Aden demurred.96 Their objections were less concerned with legal niceties and more with material scarcity, as the Eastern Protectorate was suffering a severe famine at the time. The High Commissioner in India explained: ‘the problem of providing 93 Private Secretary to the Chief Minister’s Secretariat, Hyderabad to the Deputy Secretary to the Government of India, Ministry of States, 25 March, 1950, NAI, MoS, f.10(11)-H/49. 94 J. N. Chaudhuri to N. M. Buch, Joint Secretary to the Government of India, Ministry of States, 16 February, 1949, NAI, MoS, f.175-H/48. 95 Ibid. 96 J. N. Chaudhuri to S. Narayanaswamy, Deputy Secretary to the Government of India, Ministry of States, 15 July, 1949, NAI, MoS, f.10(11)-H/49.

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sufficient food for the existing population in this area is already overtaxing local resources . . . any increase in this population might well have really disastrous results’. He asked, therefore, that India delay sending anyone to the Eastern Protectorate until the arrival of the monsoon eased the food situation.97 Hyderabad’s Government was extremely eager to get these people off their hands, given that they were being held in camps at government expense.98 The government of India, therefore, prepared a boat of 500 passengers to be sent to the Western Protectorate in March 1949. When they docked, however, 390 proved to be from the Eastern Protectorate. Worse still, ‘almost all the Hadramis who made up the bulk of the total are from the famine stricken areas’.99 When called upon to explain himself, Chaudhuri pleaded ignorance in the case, writing that, ‘under the previous regime in Hyderabad very few records exist regarding such Arabs and in many cases, information has to be taken from the Arabs themselves’. He assured the government of India that the military authorities had been ‘thoroughly satisfied with the statements of the persons concerned that they belong to the Western Protectorate’.100 Given the sudden rise in the number of Arabs on their rosters who claimed to be from the Western Protectorate, it is not beyond reason to assume that the Indian authorities were complicit in this stratagem. The flexibility of self-identification did not work so well for persons being sent to Pakistan, however. Many of those detained as ‘Pakistan nationals’ were in fact Muslims from India, who had given their destination as Pakistan when they were arrested.101 The government of Pakistan sent an officer to the camp at Dhond in Bombay Province to assess the claims of individuals there to Pakistani nationality. Though he approved more than 2400 for travel to Pakistan, several hundred

97 E. G. Willan, Office of the High Commissioner for the United Kingdom in India, to S. Dutt, Additional Secretary to the Government of India, Ministry of External Affairs and Commonwealth Relations, 31 January, 1949, NAI, MoS, f.175-H/48. 98 UK High Commissioner in India to the Acting Governor of Aden, 24 February, 1949, National Archives UK, DO 142/441. 99 Aide Memoire, [undated], NAI, MoS, f.175-H/48. 100 J. N. Chaudhuri to the Deputy Secretary to the Government of India, Ministry of States, 7 April, 1949, NAI, MoS, f.175-H/48. 101 Major J. W. Snooks, Lieutenant-General, Southern Command, to Army HQ, New Delhi, 30 July, 1949, NAI, MoS, f.10(12)-H/49.

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were denied permits to move to Pakistan.102 Of those, 347 were reported to be ‘Indian nationals (Muslims)’.103 Having been refused transit to Pakistan, these families were released from detention. They, too, were left to obtain a permit to migrate to Pakistan on their own.104 Those who were willing to remain in India, who numbered several hundred, were returned to their homes. But this did not necessarily end the ordeal for them. In at least some cases district magistrates were ‘asked to maintain a look out for their arrival in their districts and to keep them under surveillance for some time’.105 Others used their status as aliens to their advantage in India. Those men and women of non-Indian origin who remained in Hyderabad appealed to their embassies to redress grievances that the authorities in Hyderabad had failed to remedy. When Afghans resident in Hyderabad encountered several difficulties after the occupation began, they appealed to the Afghan Embassy for help. Several petitioned their Embassy to try to get compensation for the losses they had suffered in the violence of 1948, or to regain possession of property that had been stolen or occupied. Others, like the Pashtuns who originated from NWFP, used their roots to profess loyalty to India and assert their rights. In one case, Ghulam Jan Khan asked the Afghan Embassy to help him secure compensation for property damaged in a riot in 1951. The authorities in Hyderabad found, however, that he had ‘been living in Hyderabad since his birth and his forefathers had been in this State for more than a hundred years. It was only a year after the Police Action in Hyderabad that he, somehow, succeeded in obtaining a passport from the Afghan Embassy and declared himself a non-Indian and an Afghan National’.106 In this case, Mr Khan attempted to acquire non-Indian nationality in order to gain privileges inside India that could only be accessed through pressure from a foreign government. 102 S. Narayanaswamy, Deputy Secretary to the Government of India, Ministry of States, to L. G. Mirchandani, Deputy Secretary to the Government of India, Ministry of Defence, 20 August, 1949, NAI, MoS, f.10(12)-H/49. 103 Note by Ministry of Defence, 27 August, 1949, NAI, MoS, f.10(12)-H/49. 104 S. Narayanaswamy, Deputy Secretary to the Government of India, Ministry of States to the Military Governor, Hyderabad, 30 August, 1949, NAI, MoS, f.10(12)H/49. 105 K. Ramunni Menon, Chief Secretary to the Government of Madras to the Secretary to the Government of India, Ministry of States, 21 November, 1949, NAI, MoS, f.10(72)-H/49. 106 Chief Secretary to the Government of Hyderabad to the Secretary to the Government of India, Ministry of External Affairs, 17 January, 1952.

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Another Afghan, Abdul Karim Khan, complained to the Afghan Embassy that, ‘Every day Afghans are being arrested indiscriminately . . . on false and trumped up charges’. Once arrested, these men often found that their movable property was looted and their immovable property illegally occupied. Mr Khan conceded that Hyderabad’s Military Governor, Major General J. N. Chaudhuri was ‘ever ready to help us’, but alleged that, ‘local officers do not co-operate with us and sometimes treat us with contempt’. He asked the Afghan Ambassador to see to it that the Indian government ‘deal with us fairly’.107 The Royal Afghan Embassy took up the question of the arrests and the stolen and occupied property with the government of India’s Ministry of External Affairs. The government of Hyderabad issued a blanket denial of the general accusations: It is incorrect to say that Afghan nationals in Hyderabad are receiving treatment any different to that accorded to other citizens. The life and property of Afghans in Hyderabad are safe and the Administration is making a special point regarding their welfare.

He reiterated that ‘the majority of Afghans’ in Hyderabad were moneylenders, and therefore unpopular. He suggested that this may explain why false accusations had been made against them.108 The question of belonging was not just a question of government policy: Afghans were allowed to stay, but officers on the ground and other members of the population had their own understanding of who belonged, and could make life difficult for non-Indians who wished to stay. Certainly, this quotidian understanding of citizenship was tied up in being Muslim. The fact that these people were doubly marked as ‘outsiders’ may have emboldened their foes to try to get them arrested and sent away. A final example will serve to demonstrate the ways in which these residents expressed their loyalty in order to assert their rights. When a group of Pashtuns formed a ‘Pakhtoon Jirga’ and asked the Collector at Aurangabad to help them secure compensation for losses suffered during the post-police action unrest, they argued: ‘That their kith and kin . . . took an active part in the War of Independence of India, by their whole-hearted support, helpless 107 Abdul Karim Khan Vakil, Afghan National, Nampalli Chaman, Hyderabad Dn, to Sardar Najibullah Khan, Afghan Ambassador to India, 3 May, 1949, NAI, MoS, f.10(37)-H/49. 108 J. N. Chaudhuri to the Secretary to the Government of India, Ministry of States, 26 May, 1949, NAI, MoS, f.10(37)-H/49.

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sacrifices, in the movement of Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan’. This framed their appeal so as to profess their collective loyalty to India. They then assured the authorities that ‘local Pathans never took an active part in the political activities whatsoever and . . . always remained as loyal subjects and thus enjoyed the confidence of the Congress’. This positioned the group within the new, more restrictive, limits of Muslim politics in post-partition India. As the idea of political parties for Muslims lost legitimacy with the formation of Pakistan, loyalty to the Congress, and, moreover, a willingness to abandon all active participation in politics, was the surest way to please India’s new rulers. Finally, the Pakhtoon Jirga pointed to the contribution its members had played in commerce, trade and agriculture, arguing that they had ‘always proved as an asset to the Hyderabad State’.109 This suggests that in quotidian understandings of the right of residency and therefore rights of access to government services such as compensation and restoration of property, it was understood that these rights were dependent upon the perceived utility and loyalty of entire communities of people. People of non-Indian origin thus found ways of asserting their rights which used their status as outsiders to their advantage.

Conclusion Particularly in the years before the introduction of the Constitution, informal understandings of belonging were more influential than the enforcement of legal rights in determining whether non-Indian Muslims could be citizens or residents of India. The question of belonging was intimately tied to the experience of partition, even in a territory like Hyderabad which was not directly split in the division of the subcontinent. Whilst Hyderabadi politics did not parallel those in north India which produced the partition, Hyderabad was nonetheless viewed through the discursive lens of all-India polarization produced by partition. Thus Indian Muslims were rendered parenthetical citizens—‘Indian citizens (Muslims)’—because their presence in India disrupted the narrative of partition in which religious affiliation and

109 Members of the Pakhtoon Jirga, Hyderabad, to the Collector, Aurangabad, 20 January, 1951, NAI, MoS, f.17(9)-H/51.

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national loyalty were merged. Muslims who were not of Indian origin were doubly marked as outsiders. Nonetheless, these everyday notions of citizenship could come into conflict with formal rules regarding nationality. In the transition to a global system in which mobility was more closely regulated, governments became more reliant on legal and documentary proof of nationality. When Afghans and Arabs and Pathans were unable to supply the proof required by their ‘home’ governments, they appeared to be trapped between a legal regime with requirements they could not satisfy and everyday understandings of belonging which would exclude them from India. Because the legal regime was reliant upon self-identification, however, most of the men and their families had more freedom to move than might be expected. Indeed, the creative use of self-identification helped many to leave India if they so desired. Interestingly, officials in India proved willing to either bend the rules or to strategically neglect them in order to help get these men and their families out of the country. This implies that informal conceptions of belonging could, at times, have significant influence over government action. Those Muslims of non-Indian origin who did stay found new ways to assert their rights and to profess their loyalty in India. Some used their status as foreigners to raise the profile of their claims against Indian authorities. Others, like the Pakhtoon Jirga mentioned above, exhibited notions of belonging which were bound neither geographically nor demographically by the borders of the Indian state. Indeed, this research suggests that the more bounded ideal of the nation stalled on its way to ascendance. The strategic alliance with Afghanistan over Kashmir ensured that the government of India could not deport many Afghans. International obstruction ensured that Arabs who could not be formally deported and who did not wish to make their own way out of India would remain. As a result the ethnic mix of Hyderabad (and therefore India) was more diverse than had been originally envisioned in 1948. The presence of migrants and the fact of migration ensured that the government of India had to accept the presence of people of non-Indian origin in India, even as their domestic calculations had to incorporate Indians overseas.

C Cambridge University Press 2010 Modern Asian Studies 45, 1 (2011) pp. 109–130.  doi:10.1017/S0026749X10000284 First published online 29 November 2010

Punjabi Refugees’ Rehabilitation and the Indian State: Discourses, Denials and Dissonances IAN TALBOT Department of History, School of Humanities, University of Southampton, Southampton S017 1BJ, UK Email: [email protected]

Abstract Studies of Punjabi partition-related refugee resettlement have revealed a gap between official accounts and those provided by migrants. The former seek to legitimize the state by narrating its role in the transformation of helpless refugees into productive citizens. First hand accounts on the other hand frequently write the state out of the rehabilitation process. This paper seeks firstly to illustrate these processes at work by contrasting the narrative account contained in the Government of India publication, The Story of Rehabilitation, with interview material collected amongst former refugees. It then goes on to reveal the presence of state agency in cases of rehabilitation, despite refugee denial. Finally, it explores the refugee-state tensions arising from migrants’ experience of local level bureaucratic and police services’ corruption, which goes some way towards explaining the narrative dissonances.

Introduction This is the story of a Ministry of the Government of India. A dull, Uninspiring theme, you will exclaim. But it is a richly evocative saga. Here are drama and passion, illimitable human suffering, heroic endeavour. Within the confines of what a Ministry set out to do and what it accomplished, you find every element of a Greek tragedy. Only everything is multiplied a thousand fold. You have men whose reason is overthrown; men plunged into the depths of anguish. Impenetrable gloom shrouds the story of their purgatory. But, as in ancient legends, there is expiation and the slow return to blessedness. These then are the ingredients of our chronicle.1 1 U. Bhaskar Rao, The Story of Rehabilitation (New Delhi: Publications Divisions, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, 1967), p. 1.

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The above quotation commences the official account of the Indian state’s response to the influx of millions of refugees from Pakistan at independence. This narrative was published in 1967, two years after the formal winding-up of the Ministry of Relief and Rehabilitation. The 230-page volume was published to provide the definitive account of the story of rehabilitation. While the purple prose of the prelude is not sustained throughout the publication, the themes of tragedy, loss, redemption and restoration are recurring. This paper reveals how the particular experiences of mass migration in the Punjab were universalized in The Story of Rehabilitation and earlier official accounts. It argues that the Indian state sought legitimization through a master narrative of its successful handling of the Punjab’s refugee crisis. This account not only occluded the more problematic Bengal migration story,2 which was ultimately to encompass greater numbers, but also homogenized a complex and highly differentiated Punjab refugee experience.3 The paper also explores how Punjabis themselves have recounted the process of rehabilitation. Migrants’ memories utilize the stereotypes of Punjabi self-reliance and industry which have found their way in a minor key into the official accounts.4 Primarily, however, they contest the master narrative’s emphasis on the state’s role in surmounting India’s post-partition refuge crisis. Given documentary evidence of considerable state intervention in Punjab, if not in Bengal,5

2 For a discussion of the different experiences of migration and resettlement in Punjab and Bengal see, I. Talbot and G. Singh, The Partition of India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), Chapter 4. For the state’s attitude and failings in dealing with rehabilitation in West Bengal see Joya Chatterji, The Spoils of Partition: Bengal and India, 1947–1967 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2007); ‘Right or Charity? The Debate over Relief and Rehabilitation in West Bengal, 1947–50’ in Suvir Kaul (ed.), The Partitions of Memory: The Afterlife of the Division of India (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2001) pp. 74–110. 3 The greatest migration in the Bengal region occurred in 1950 rather than in 1947. By 1981 the West Bengal Refugee rehabilitation Committee put the number of refugees at around 8 millions, that is one-sixth of the total population. 4 The Story of Rehabilitation declares, for example, ‘It redounds to the eternal credit of the displaced persons from West Pakistan (that) their toughness, their sturdy sense of self reliance, their pride . . . would not submit to the indignity of living on doles and charity . . . in this hour of supreme need.’ p. 37. 5 Indeed, Bengali refugees from East Pakistan argued that they were the principal victims of Partition because of the Government’s half-hearted approach to their rehabilitation. It was an important factor in the support refugees gave to the Communist Party of India, especially in the wake of the threatened legislation in 1951 to evict those who had self-settled in the squatter colonies of Calcutta. See,

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this raises the questions: • how reliable are testimonies of self-settlement; • what circumstances caused individuals to seek refuge in community stereotypes of self-reliance; • how typical are the experiences of enterprise and self-help which are now part of the staple of first hand accounts of Punjabi migrants? In order to address these questions, this paper looks in detail at two narratives provided by Punjabi migrants from Pakistan. It sets these alongside that provided by a Punjabi who made the reverse journey from Amritsar to Lahore in 1947 to assess whether there are commonalities in the omission of the details of state assistance across the national and religious divides. Finally, the paper hypothesizes whether research on the Untouchables’ resettlement experiences would resolve some of the dissonances between state and individual accounts of refugee rehabilitation. Before turning to these questions, it is necessary to consider how official accounts addressed the violence which had precipitated the mass migration in the Punjab region between August and November 1947. Two observations can be made. Firstly, there is no acknowledgement that the state manifestly failed in its duty to protect minority citizens. This failure at the outset of the independence of the Indian and Pakistan Dominions is not only conveniently overlooked, but overcompensated for by the emphasis on the Herculean efforts to assist refuges. Secondly, recourse is either made to the fact that the violence was insensate and thus unstoppable, or blame is displaced onto the ‘other’. This results in conflicting official accounts in which the Punjab massacres are seen as simultaneously being planned by the paramilitary organizations of the ‘other’ and as spontaneous irrational outbreaks.6 Current research on the violence is sometimes confused by these conflicting historical discourses. The Story of Rehabilitation Prafulla Chakrabarty, The Marginal Men: The Refugees and the Left Political Syndrome in West Bengal (Kalyani: Lumiere Books, 1990). 6 The West Punjab Government for example produced the pamphlets, The Sikhs in Action (Lahore: Government Printing Press, West Punjab, 1948); Notes on the Sikh Plan (Lahore: Government Printing Press, West Punjab, 1948); RSSS in Punjab (Lahore: Government Printing Press, West Punjab, 1948). The Indian response to these claims of deliberate genocide in West Punjab was G. D. Khosla’s work, Stern Reckoning: A Survey of Events Leading up to and Following the Partition of India, 2nd edn (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999). It was based on the researches of the Fact Finding Commission of the Government of India’s Ministry of Relief and Rehabilitation.

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represents the official tendency to portray the violence that caused the two-way flight of some ten-million Punjabis as insensate, spontaneous and uncontrollable. The partition violence is a one-off event which is aberrational and inexplicable. This understanding which has been challenged by a range of authors absolves the state from both complicity and failure to safeguard minority interests.7 At the same time it generates the reader’s pity for the refugees who have been overtaken by events in which they did not play any part. Once the uncontrollable and spontaneous nature of the violence is established, the Indian state enters the narrative with respect to the unprecedented problem of providing safe escort from Pakistan for the millions on the move. The circumstances in which the Punjab Boundary Force had to be wound up are glossed over, because it might encourage consideration of the role of state functionaries in violence, or at least raise difficult questions concerning why law and order could not be maintained.8 But the role of the Military Evacuation Organization (MEO) which replaced it following an agreement between India and Pakistan is trumpeted in overseeing what became a virtual exchange of population in the Punjab region.9 Despite misgivings, fears for the security of minorities along with the need to utilize properties and land to accommodate incoming refugees determined this policy. Further government control over the migration process was exerted by settling rural refugee populations together in assigned districts. The Joint Evacuation Plan agreed on 20 October, 1947 between the Indian and Pakistan MEOs set a December target for the evacuation of ten-million refugees from both sides of the Punjab. The gravity of the situation and the sterling work done by the Indian Army is built up in a series of statements which concludes with It details village by village, atrocities committed on the Hindu and Sikh minority populations of West Punjab. 7 See, Anders Bjorn Hansen, Partition and Genocide: Manifestation of Violence in Punjab 1937–47 (New Delhi: India Research Press, 2002); Paul Brass, ‘The Partition of India and Retributive Genocide in the Punjab 1946–47: Means, Methods and Purposes’, Journal of Genocide Research, Vol. 5, No. 1 (2003), pp. 71–101; Ian Talbot, ‘The 1947 Punjab Violence’ in I. Talbot (ed.) The Deadly Embrace: Religion, Politics and Violence in India and Pakistan 1947–2002 (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2007) pp. 1–16; Ian Talbot and G. Singh, The Partition of India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Gyanendra Pandey, Remembering Partition: Violence, Nationalism and History in India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 8 Rao, The Story of Rehabilitation, p. 10. 9 For the work of the Indian Military evacuation Organisation see Brigadier Rajendra Singh, The Military Evacuation organisation 1947–48 (New Delhi: Government of India, 1962).

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the comment by the Minister for Relief and Rehabilitation broadcast on 11 January, 1948 that, ‘the distance between the people and the Army has been obliterated by the magnificent work done by our officers and men in the hour of need’.10 The sense of engagement with the suffering of the refugees is sustained through references to their fear and brokenness. Yet what is most important for the narrative is to build up the epic nature of the dislocation arising from partition. In less than five months more than four million refugees had poured into India. They had to be received and provided with temporary accommodation, fed and clothed, given interim relief, preserved against the inroads of disease that follows in the wake of tragedies of such dimensions and then dispersed to sites of permanent rehabilitation.11

For it is in dealing with these unforeseen and unprecedented circumstances that the state receives its legitimization. Ultimately, it is not the refugees, but the state’s representatives who are the heroes of the narrative. ‘For its operations’, the report’s author writes of the Ministry of Relief and Rehabilitation, ‘its resources were slender beyond belief. For its operations it had hardly a single precedent. With pity and compassion as the driving power, it had to devise schemes as well as the strategy for their execution. And unlike as in certain other fields of national enterprise, there was no help sought from abroad, nor was any forthcoming’.12 In language borrowed from the New Testament, the report continues to describe the Ministry’s ‘indefatigable effort to bring healing to these bruised masses of humanity, to wipe their tears, apply balm to their wounds, assuage their hunger and thirst, clothe their nakedness’.13 The state’s role is thus eulogized with respect to the relief measures designed to feed, clothe and shelter the refugees. The enormity of the task is again stressed, this time in terms of the poor physical and psychological condition of the refugees. Again the narrative is designed to evoke sympathy for the refugees and admiration for the state in its tackling of these enormous needs. The role of the various state agencies in addressing the ‘refugee problem’ had been painstakingly recorded in an earlier Government

10 11 12 13

Rao, The Story of Rehabilitation, p. 19. Ibid., pp. 36–37. Ibid., p. 3. Ibid., p. 2.

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publication of 1948 entitled, Millions on the Move.14 From the outset Nehru had been acutely aware of the need to counteract the ‘stress (that) had been laid in newspapers throughout the world on the destructive aspect of the recent happenings’. He was especially keen to produce the right publicity about the ‘work done on rehabilitation, relief and evacuation’.15 Millions on the Move initiated the vision of a uniform refugee migration experience. This became associated with iconic images drawn from the Punjab of men, women and children with their heavily laden bullock carts travelling across tracks of ground inundated by the monsoon rains; trains with not only their carriages, but running boards and roofs, packed with refuges. In Bengal, however, people moved much more by steamer. Even in Punjab, the reality was different from the standard portrayal. There was considerable anticipatory migration by the wealthy moneylenders and businessmen from Lahore. It was the poorer Hindus and those who were less politically sensitive who were left as acute migrants to scramble for safety in August 1947.16 Even the wealthy who had left it late to depart could buy their way to safety. It is a little remarked fact of partition migration history that the British Overseas Airways Corporation transported 28,000 people from Pakistan in the period 15 September to 7 December, 1947. This was in addition to the twice daily service from Lahore to Amritsar run by the Indian National Airways.17 Such passengers could look down on the burning villages and ant-like refugee columns traversing the Punjab’s killing fields. On the rare occasions when the elite travellers were inconvenienced it reached the highest levels of Government. Nehru noted with displeasure early in October 1947, an incident when a flight direct from Peshawar to Delhi had to set down at Lahore because of slight engine trouble and its ‘occupants had been stripped of all their belongings’.18 In addition to status, the uniform understanding of the migration experience in Millions on the Move does not reflect fully on the gendered 14 Government of India, Millions on the Move: The Aftermath of Partition (New Delhi: Publications Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, undated). See, for example, Chapter 6, pp. 44 & ff. 15 Emergency Committee 26th Meeting 7 November, 1947 MB1/D275, University of Southampton. 16 On anticipatory migration see, Talbot and Singh, The Partition of India, p. 105. 17 Ibid., p. 106. 18 Extract from Emergency Committee 20th Meeting, 3 October, 1947 MB1/D275, University of Southampton.

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dimension which has been the focus of much recent work, especially with respect to the recovery of abducted women.19 By October 1952, just over 8,000 women and children had been rehabilitated from Pakistan. Recovery was in some instances forced and involved separation from children and new family ties for an uncertain reception in the land of the abducted women’s origin. The task of recovery was nevertheless actively pursued by the state agencies as it was seen as important for Indian honour and building the nation in the wake of partition. Just as women were not in charge of their own fate with respect to recovery, so in the words of Ravinder Kaur, ‘they do not author’ their partition history.20 Official accounts constitute them as ‘victims’ who can be statistically accounted for, but whose range of experiences is condensed in the generalized partition narrative. The Story of Rehabilitation, presents a similar uniform refugee narrative to Millions on the Move with the emphasis on the state’s guardianship role. This standard account again glosses over the immense differences both in refugee experience and the state’s responses to the Punjabi migrant community. Ironically, politicians who carved out new careers as refugee spokesmen, in many instances were to avoid or mitigate the indignities and losses of the majority of those who they represented. The Story of Rehabilitation is not only careful to portray the ‘success story’ of the huge refugee camp at Kurukshetra in Haryana, but to provide a standardized picture of the refugee experience. There is no hint of the different levels of provision, depending on the refugee’s status which Ravinder Kaur has recently pointed out regarding the treatment of Punjabi migrants in Delhi.21 Whether refugees could afford their own food rations, for example, determined whether they would be directed to a life under canvas in the Edward and Outram Lines of the vast Kingsway refugee camp, or be accommodated in concrete barracks at the Hudson and Reeds Lines.22 Later, permanent housing projects were undertaken on a status basis with varieties of plot size, streets and availability of services depending on the refugees’ wealth. The clearest indication of the State’s maintaining old caste and gender hierarchies in refugee rehabilitation was seen in the provision of separate colonies for 19 See Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin, Borders and Boundaries: Women in India’s Partition (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1998). 20 Ravinder Kaur, Since 1947: Partition Narratives Among Punjabi Migrants of Delhi (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 254. 21 Ibid., pp. 99–100. 22 Ibid., p. 99.

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Untouchables and for young widows. With respect to the latter, the Delhi authorities established control over social behaviour by ensuring that the women did not go outside the camp without the permission of female social workers.23 Building materials were inferior for the poorer types of accommodation with the result that throughout the early 1950s the newspapers recount tales of building collapses as a result of heavy monsoon rains. The worst facilities were provided for Untouchable refugees who were also housed away from the main localities. Fifty houses collapsed in the 1950 monsoon rains at the Haripura Refugee Colony for Untouchables in Amritsar. Their occupants were promised speedy repairs following protests outside the District rent Controllers Office. Yet seven years later, the monsoon rains were still bringing house collapses and fatalities in their wake.24 The Story of Rehabilitation concludes with the refugee problem surmounted and the displaced population now fully integrated into the nation-building activities of the Indian state. The migrants have made the transition from helpless destitutes to fully-fledged citizens, in part because of their own resilience. The main factor has however been state agency. ‘In the Western Region, thus the Rehabilitation Ministry can look back with pride on the accomplishment of a near miracle . . .’ the report concludes, The new environment has transformed the refugee into a purposeful citizen of India. Truly it may be said of the Rehabilitation Ministry that its functioning has been a two-way blessing. It channelised the country’s compassion and beneficence that they might serve the refugees in the hour of trial and reaped for the nation an enrichment of spiritual and material resources.25

This master narrative of refugee rehabilitation has come under increasing challenge.26 Even in Punjab, which experienced a single torrent of migration rather than the prolonged waves of refugees in Bengal which continued during the 1950s, migration was not just a single journey. Many Punjabis, especially those from an urban background, travelled from place to place in their new homeland

23

Ibid., p. 252. Hindustan Times (Delhi), 3 August, 1957. 25 Rao, The Story of Rehabilitation, p. 138. 26 See, Kaur, Since 1947; Ian Talbot, Divided Cities: Partition and its Aftermath in Lahore and Amritsar 1947–1957 (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2006); Sarah Ansari, Life After Partition: Migration, Community and Strife in Sindh 1947–62 (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2005). 24

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before finally settling permanently. Indeed for some families there was to be years of wandering.27 Despite its failures to address the intricacies and inadequacies of the rehabilitation process, the official account nonetheless points to the fact that the solution of the refugee problem impacted heavily on nation-building and political development throughout the subcontinent. The need to coordinate resources to deal with the refugee influx, meant that the most important embodiments of the early post-colonial Indian State were the Emergency Cabinet Committee, chaired by Lord Mountbatten, and the Ministry of Relief and Rehabilitation. The latter had an ‘ambiguous’ relationship with the non-state agency Central Relief Committee founded by the AllIndia Congress Committee in late July 1947. This new body bypassed traditional agencies such as the Public Works Department and, according to Ravinder Kaur, displayed ‘a reformist zeal and urgency’ which was different from the institutions inherited from the colonial state.28 Turning from a top-down to a bottom-up perspective, it is still not fully acknowledged that for millions of individuals in North India, their encounter with the post-independence state focused solely on its responses to the problems arising from partitionrelated mass migration. At the most basic level, they needed to seek shelter, food and necessities from the state. Official histories provide a homogenized view of the refugee-state encounter. In reality this was determined by the cultural (literacy) and social capital (political connections) which refugees brought to their encounters with administrators who worked in the various agencies which dealt with rehabilitation. Indeed much of the new historical understanding of the resettlement and rehabilitation process is derived from the petitions which relatively privileged upper caste refugees presented to influential Congressmen and refugee representatives who forwarded these requests to Government.29 The scale on which the national and Punjab governments provided resources for housing, feeding, educating and providing work for refugees has not always found its way into historical accounts. The East 27 See, for example, the account of Sardar Mohan Singh in I. Talbot (ed.) with Darshan Singh Tatla, Epicentre of Violence: Partition Voices and Memories from Amritsar (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2006), pp. 149–158. 28 Kaur, Since 1947, p. 117. 29 See, for example, the Diwan Chaman Lall and S. P. Mukherjee Papers at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, Delhi.

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Punjab Government for example had spent Rs. 190 millions on relief and rehabilitation by January 1950. Rehabilitation costs, excluding industrial and vocational training schemes, work centres and housing schemes, came to over Rs. 44 millions. Relief measures in the refugee camps came to Rs. 99 millions while over Rs. 44 millions worth of loans had been disbursed to refugees.30 Government set aside, for example, Rs. 15 lakhs as grants of Rs. 500 each for petty shopkeepers and Rs. 35 lakhs as loans of Rs. 5,000 each for small-scale industries and workshops.31 Refugees were also given until 22 December, 1947 to tender for the leases of factories abandoned by Muslims. The government aim throughout the rehabilitation process was to prevent dependency. Training centres and loans were designed for refugees to re-establish their own businesses, even if this only involved putting up wooden stalls on approved sites. Industrial homes were set up for widows in such cities as Amritsar to give them training in embroidery, tailoring, spinning and weaving of tape, ‘to enable them to earn independent living in due course’.32 The East Punjab Government established rural housing schemes for Pakistani migrants. It also provided loans for food and fodder, the purchase of seed and bullocks and the reconstruction of houses and wells. Such support helped the Hindu and Sikh agriculturalists who had vacated the rich irrigated districts of West Punjab for the poorer pickings of East Punjab. Even so, a system of ‘graded cuts’ had to be applied as there was insufficient land available to fully compensate the refugee farmers.33 According to the classic account, Out of the Ashes by M. S. Randhawa who was appointed special revenue officer for refugee settlement, tractor loans alone mounted to 3.2 million rupees.34 Between September 1947 and March 1951, RS. 40 millions were disbursed to displaced cultivators.35 These measures were to lay the foundations of the Indian Punjab’s Green Revolution two decades later.

30

Tribune (Ambala), 26 March, 1950. Tribune (Simla), 13 December, 1947. 32 See Tribune (Ambala), 5 and 12 June, 1950. 33 Hindu and Sikh refugees vacated 9.6 million acres of land in Pakistan, but had only 5.5 million acres of land abandoned by Muslim farmers on which to settle in India. 34 M. S. Randhawa, Out of the Ashes: An Account of the Rehabilitation of Refugees from West Pakistan in Rural Areas of East Punjab (Chandigarh: Public Relations Department, Punjab, 1954), p. 167. 35 Ibid., p. 162. 31

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The East Punjab government also addressed the needs of urban refugees through its building of new satellite towns such as Faridabad and Rajpura, as well as the provision of training and funding for refugees to set up their own businesses. The development of Rajpura on the Grand Trunk Road, 15 miles west of Ambala, cost Rs. 20 millions. It was termed ‘one of the biggest experiments of the Government of India in building a well planned and simple yet dignified home for refugees’.36 Nevertheless, a significant proportion of the former West Punjab Hindu capitalist class drawn from the Arora and Khatri communities was to abandon Punjab altogether and relocate to Delhi and Bombay. Both the Indian and East Punjab Governments thus brought considerable resources to bear in meeting the needs of Punjabi refugee. This was funded through use of the inherited sterling balances and the funds raised on the population as a whole under the refugee tax. The paltry support provided in comparison by the West Bengal government reflected its weaker fiscal base, lack of support from the Centre, and the fact that migration in the region was regarded as a temporary rather than permanent phenomenon. There was thus no exchange of evacuee property as in the Punjab region. In the circumstances, the authorities in Calcutta could do little more than provide basic immediate relief. While refugee camps in Punjab had closed as early as 1948, a decade later, the camp population in Calcutta alone stood at 800,000. One-third of their inhabitants had spent anything from six to ten years living in these squalid surroundings.37 The government’s response was to disperse refugees with its attendant human costs and resulting tensions with neighbouring states such as Assam which were reluctant to receive more refugees. The most ambitious and controversial dispersal scheme involved moving over 25,000 families to the 270,000 cleared acres of forest at Dandakaranya in Orissa and Madhya Pradesh.38 The Andaman Islands and the remote Sunderbans region of West Bengal

36

Statesman (Calcutta), 28 May, 1949. Nilanjana Chatterjee, ‘The East Bengal Refugees: A Lesson in Survival’, in Sukanta Chaudhuri (ed.), Calcutta: The Living City, 2 vols (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990), ii: The Present and the Past, p. 74. 38 See Gyanesh Kudaisya, ‘Divided Landscapes, Fragmented Identities. East Bengal Refugees and their Rehabilitation in India, 1947–79’, in D. A. Low and Howard Brasted (eds.), Freedom, Trauma, Continuities: Northern India and Independence (New Delhi: Sage 1998), pp. 115–116. 37

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were other dispersal sites. The Bengal refugee experience was clearly not the stuff of national myth-making. In respect of the Punjab however, the levels of expenditure and organizational effort, were not completely divorced from the rhetoric of such works as The Story of Rehabilitation. Yet this degree of state assistance is seldom acknowledged in the personal testimonies of Punjabi partition migrants. Is this simply the result of the unreliability of first hand accounts, or is this too simplistic an understanding of the gap between individual and state accounts?

Refugee accounts The past decade has seen a growing number of studies of the Punjabi migrant experience in such varied localities as Delhi, Amritsar, and Ludhiana.39 These accounts have utilized a range of documentary sources, but at their heart has been the recovery of previously silenced refugee voices. What is striking is the dissonance between these first hand testimonies and the account provided in official histories. This process will be illustrated in the three extracts below. Before turning to these, it is necessary to reflect on the methodological issues raised by first-hand accounts of partition and its aftermath. The accuracy of memory of partition can be clouded not just by the lengthy passage of time, but by the fact that forgetting and selecting memories from a time of trauma have been strategies necessary for everyday life to continue thereafter. Memories will be individual in that what is forgotten and recollected will vary according to circumstances, both at the time and as a result of subsequent life events. It is however increasingly recognized that there is a strong collective element in personal recollection. Individual memories that do not conform to community historical narratives may be distorted or suppressed. Refuge in a generalized public discourse may of course save the individual from embarrassing personal details. This could be seen, for example, in suppression in line with community notions of honour, of family memories with respect to the sensitive issue of 39 See Kaur, Since 1947; Talbot, Divided Cities,; Urvashi Butalia, The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India (New Delhi: Penguin, 1998); Pippa Virdee, ‘Partition and Locality: Case Studies of the Impact of Partition and Its Aftermath in the Punjab Region 1947–61’, Unpublished Ph.D. Thesis, Coventry University, 2005; Ian Talbot and Darshan Singh. Tatla, (eds.) Epicentre of Violence: partition Voices and Memories from Amritsar (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2006).

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the abduction of women. Individuals may also refer to community discourses rather than personal narratives when they fit better the self-image they wish to cultivate. Most personal testimonies of refugee resettlement have been recorded with migrants from middle class and above backgrounds.40 Indeed there is a parallel here with the documentary record which provides a supposedly uniform refugee experience which is in reality that based on a narrow range of communities, primarily drawn from the Hindu Khatri and Arora castes and the Sikh Jats and Khatris. Few records of interviews exist for the experiences of Chamars, Sunars and Tarkhans, despite their demographic significance within the Punjabi Hindu and Sikh populations.41 The upper caste migrants as such were not totally dependent on state provision, but rather possessed the pre-existing skills and contacts that determined the ability to restore the partition losses. It is precisely from these social groups that the tendency to fail to acknowledge state intervention is most pronounced. This is both because of internalization of stereotypes of Punjabi self-sufficiency and because of silences arising from both successes and failures in accessing a corrupt everyday state. It may thus be that the emerging dissonance between state and refugee accounts of resettlement rests in part on the oral sources available to historians. Oral accounts in sum are as limited and constructed sources for the historian of partition and its aftermath as are documentary records. The omission of details of state assistance in refugee rehabilitation could thus be the result of faulty recall, a desire not to tarnish the community notion of self-reliance, to uphold family pride, or obscure embarrassing details of bribery and use of influence to acquire property. These processes can be seen at work in the extracts below which are representative of a much larger corpus of oral testimony relating to Punjabi refugee rehabilitation in that they omit the role of the state in the process.42 The first account is drawn from an interview Ravinder Kaur conducted with Swaram Raj, an elder in a commercial Punjabi Hindu family which had migrated from Lahore to Delhi in 1947. The family had run a successful clothing retail business for over a generation

40 It is much more difficult to follow the normal cascade approach to interviews through personal introductions with respect to lower class refugee families. 41 For details see, Harish C. Sharma, Artisans of the Punjab: A Study of Social Change in Historical perspective 1849–1947 (New Delhi: Manohar, 1996), pp.48–63. 42 See for example, Talbot and Tatla (eds.) Epicentre of Violence, pp.13–19.

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known as Krishan Lal Mehr Chand enterprise. It restarted its business in Delhi with considerable success. Rehabilitation according to the sentiments expressed below apparently owed everything to the family’s hard work and God’s blessing and nothing to the state’s rehabilitation processes. We never took anything from the government. It is because God has always been kind to us. We bought a shop here and in Benaras and our business took off very well. It was due to the grace of God. We met kind people and everything became alright. Our ancestors’ good karma kept us going.43

The extent to which divine intervention is used to explain the restoration of partition-related losses is common in many oral accounts. It reveals not only traits of fatalism and religiosity, but can foreclose what might otherwise become uncomfortable discussion of rehabilitation. Swaram Raj’s family did in fact interact with the state and its restored fortunes depended to a much greater degree on this than is initially acknowledged. The family had sufficient wealth to buy a property from a widow in Karol Bagh, a Delhi suburb that had been largely abandoned by Muslims, thereby illustrating that social and commercial capital brought by migrants in this, as in many instances, smoothed the rehabilitation process. Karol Bagh was however designated as a residential, rather than a commercial locality. This meant that the family could not legally trade from the premises with the result that, ‘government officials had been troubling us and were not being helpful’.44 The matter was resolved when the traders paid Rs. 16,000 to an influential official whose wife had bought saris from the shop. The shop could then operate as an authorized business. Shortly afterwards, the family’s fortunes were further enhanced when the whole locality was declared a commercial area, thereby greatly raising property prices. ‘We had bought (the property) Swaram Raj’s nephew recorded in another interview, ‘as a residential property, so we gained immensely from the conversion’.45 A similar account of lack of state involvement on the surface emerges from an interview conducted with Sardar Gurcharan Singh Bhatia in Amritsar in November 2002. He was a retired railway official whose family had migrated to India from the Sialkot district of Pakistan in 1947. Before partition the family had considerable landholdings as 43 44 45

Kaur, Since 1947, p. 131. Ibid., p. 133. Ibid.,p. 133.

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well as owning a brick kiln business and a commissioning agent shop for foodgrains. In response to a question concerning the government’s role in their resettlement, he emphatically replied that they had no assistance, before supplying an almost stereotypical narrative of Punjabi self-reliance. So we did all sorts of odd jobs, my sisters made shawls, taking materials from the bazaar; for some time I sold home-made soap. We also managed some income by ironing people’s clothes, all these menial jobs to survive and earn two meals a day.46

Bhatia’s family, like numerous other migrants, had brought little with them, in part because of the suddenness of their flight from Pakistan, but also because they were convinced that they would be returning home in a few months, once the violence had died down. Bhatia recalled, ‘The Muslims also said, “This is going to be temporary, for a month or two.”. . . We gave the keys to those Muslims—such were our relations with local Muslims’.47 This is a common theme in oral accounts with memories of burying precious items in gardens as well as of temporarily handing over the keys of properties to Muslim neighbours for their safe keeping until return. The strong psychological need to come to terms with their reversal in fortunes, once permanent return became impossible may explain the emphasis such individuals place on their agency in the rehabilitation process. As with the Lal family in Delhi, this is, however only part of the story. Further on in our interview, Bhatia admitted that their fortunes improved when his father who was a poet got a job with the government radio station at Jullundur, reciting ghazals and when he became employed on the railways. This at first sight appears an odd career development given the family’s background. In all probability, however, Bhatia secured his posting under the state reservation scheme for displaced people. The Ministry of Railways agreed in 1948 to reserve 15,000 vacancies in grades III–IV for refugees.48 This was one of a number of educational and employment preferences designed to assist refugees. In addition to this state employment, Sardar Gurcharan Singh Bhattia continued, ‘Then our claim was met. And so we gradually picked up’.49 Here he is referring to the role of the 46 Interview with Sardar Gurcharan Singh Bhattia, Hussainpura, Amritsar, 13 November, 2002, in Talbot and Tatla (eds.) Epicentre of Violence, p. 80. 47 Ibid., p. 84. 48 Kaur, Since 1947, p. 142. 49 Talbot and Tatla, Epicentre of Violence, p. 84.

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state in overseeing evacuee property claims in which refugees received compensation for the possessions they had abandoned in Pakistan. In reality, therefore, despite Bhatia’s earlier claims that the state had done nothing for them, it had provided both employment and overseen the process of property compensation. This may not have fully restored the family’s fortunes, but it could not claim to have been abandoned to its fate. Gurcharan Singh Bhatia’s deafening silence with respect to state intervention is however a common rather than an atypical element in first hand accounts of the aftermath of partition.50 It is instructive at this point to compare these accounts with that of a Muslim Punjabi migrant to Pakistan. There are fewer oral accounts of the migration experience than have been collected in India. Nevertheless it is clear that the West Punjab state diverted massive resources to refugee rehabilitation and yet despite this, migrants seldom acknowledge its role.51 The following interview is typical of the emerging discourse on refugee rehabilitation in Pakistan. The familiar themes of self-reliance and omission of details of state assistance are present. A careful reading between the lines, however, brings the state into view and provides clues regarding its excision from the family memory. Khawaja Zubair, the present day proprietor of the Pak-Punjab Carpet House which occupies a large plot of land just off the Mall in Lahore close by the Governor’s House, migrated at the age of 14 with his parents from Amritsar. According to him, the family had been involved in the city’s carpet industry for the last ‘five or six generations’. Khawaja Zubair provides evidence of remarkable improvisation with respect to the acquisition of raw materials and capital in order to re-establish business activities in Lahore. The interview again superficially reads as part of the common discourse on Punjabi refugees’ self-reliance in which the state is excluded. One day an old artisan of my father, Musa Chuha, came to my father and told him that when he migrated from Amritsar he brought with him an unfinished carpet of my father’s. If my father could arrange a little wool he would be able to finish it and it would sell for Rs 500 or Rs 600. So my father called an artisan, Mistri Muhammad Din, who used to manufacture looms for my father at Amritsar and asked him to manufacture one for him. This loom was installed in a deserted temple at Gumti Bazaar, inside Lohari Gate. Since there was no woollen factory in Pakistan at that time, my father went to Landa Bazaar and purchased a few woollen sweaters there. My mother

50 51

Kaur, Since 1947, p. 142. For details, see Talbot, Divided Cities.

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unwove them to get the woollen thread. By using cauldrons at home we dyed the thread. And that’s how the first carpet of Pakistan was manufactured.52

Yet, Government assistance is lurking in the background as in most self-settlement accounts. Earlier in the interview, Khawaja Zubair had revealed that his father had ‘got himself allotted a shop inside Lohari Gate’. This enabled him to restart his business. Further on in the interview, he referred to the setting up of a loom in a deserted Hindu temple in Gumti Bazaar. The sensitivity surrounding the use of abandoned places of worship means that this action could not have gone unnoticed. Both the Indian and Pakistan authorities were keen to avoid accusations of the desecration or misuse of sacred space. Khawaja Zubair’s father could only have continued to use the abandoned temple with the acquiescence of the local officials. It is not possible to prove, but is likely that what could have been a lengthy process was expedited either by utilising contacts with longstanding fellow Kashmir residents of Lahore, securing the support of migrant Amritsari Muslim League politicians, or by providing a ‘consideration’ for local officials. Whatever the circumstances, despite the family’s narrative of self-reliance, the state and its officials remains an important facilitating influence.

Explanations for the dissonance between state and individual accounts of rehabilitation A number of possible explanations for the conflicts between state and individual accounts of rehabilitation have already been touched upon. The latter were no less selective and influenced by legitimization needs than the more obviously constructed national discourse. Oral historians have just as much as official accounts tended to present a universalized refugee experience which is in fact drawn from that of a narrow section of the migrant population. This has unintentionally in their case skewed a record which anyway was influenced by family and community psychological needs to present a theme of struggle and self-endeavour. The need to restore a sense of pride and agency was undoubtedly a factor in the passing down of individual experience. Family and community loss of ‘izzat’ (honour) amongst the traumatic 52 Interview with Khawaja Zubair, proprietor of Pak-Punjab Carpet House, Lahore, 22 November, 2004. I am grateful to Tahir Mahmood for conducting this interview.

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events of partition almost necessitated a discourse of self-reliance. It could draw on Orientalist stereotypes of Punjabi enterprise, selfreliance, industry and courage which had been constructed over the hundred years of colonial rule in Censuses, Land Settlement Reports and District Gazeteers. Indeed it was so pervasive that it became internalized by the region’s communities. Even official accounts, such as The Story of Rehabilitation which were designed for state legitimization repeated as we have seen these readings of the Punjabi character. Moreover, many refugees had no choice, but to fend for themselves in the absence of any other support. They thus lived up to the stereotype of self-reliance. In such circumstances, they would have no place for the state in their personal history of recovery. But as we have seen above, those individuals who did receive state support or permission for their activities have not readily acknowledged this fact. There is more to this than merely an alignment of personal memory to community history and a desire to restore izzat. It may also be more than the simple fact that support was deemed insufficient to warrant acknowledgement. Central to understanding these complexities are issues surrounding the power relations between the state and refugees and the corruption which accompanied the rehabilitation process. Suffice it to say that these are hardly acknowledged, either in official accounts or in first hand testimonies. Recent work on the partition has revealed the extent of the corruption which surrounded the rehabilitation process. The Punjabi migrant historian Raghuvendra Tanwar has declared that, Attractive statements supported by huge statistics indicating the dimensions of the resettlement efforts were routinely issued, sadly these statements concealed a whole body of corrupt decisions of injustice and unfairness. This trend increased as days and months passed for as long as the resettlement measures continued.53

Such an acknowledgement naturally did not find its way into Millions on the Move or The Story of Rehabilitation. Corruption was a feature of local level administration in the colonial Punjab as elsewhere in India.54 It greatly increased during the Second World War in the wake of shortages and state controls of basic 53 Raghuvendra Tanwar, Reporting the Partition of Punjab 1947: Press, Public and Other Opinions (New Delhi: Manohar, 2006), p. 473. 54 See, I. Talbot, Punjab and the Raj 1849–1947 (New Delhi: Manohar, 1988).

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commodities such as wheat, sugar rice, kerosene and cloth. Indeed an important element in the Muslim League’s rise to power in the Punjab was its exploitation of the grievances of Muslim farmers and townsmen who maintained that the predominantly Hindu-staffed civil supplies department was favouring co-religionists at their expense.55 In early 1947, a leading Punjab Muslim League figure, Sir Firoz Khan Noon, warned that such discrimination might result in riots.56 Muslim officials were not, however, immune. In May, 1947, Sadat Malik, the Ration and Food Inspector of Gujranwala, was arrested for embezzlement.57 Partition brought increased government controls and temptations for officials with the beginnings of what became known later as the ‘licence permit Raj’. The Amritsar Cloth Merchants Association sent telegrams to Gandhi, Nehru and Sardar Pratap Singh Kairon, East Punjab’s civil supplies minister, in November, 1947 complaining that, ‘Cloth control has brought in its wake nothing except rampant corruption, favouritism and the black market. It has lowered the morality of public and Government servants’.58 Most refugees, however, experienced corruption and nepotism with respect to the allotment of the vast amounts of abandoned property, including shops, houses and factories. While some refugees sought to exploit the system by exaggerating their losses in order to receive excessive compensation, the worst abuses involved locals who sought to pass themselves off as refugees, officials who accepted bribes and politicians who tried to lay their hands on property. When the East Punjab Minister for Refugees and Rehabilitation, Sardar Ishar Singh Majhail, addressed a press conference in Amritsar on 12 December, 1947, he was forced to admit that members of the Legislative Assembly were attempting to lay their hands on all the factories and workshops’.59 The highest profile for corruption was however provided by the West Punjab’s first post-independence Prime Minister the Nawab of Mamdot. In April 1950, a bench of the Lahore High Court found him guilty of corruption and abuse of power. These charges related to his

55 Ian Talbot, ‘The 1946 Punjab Elections’, Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 14, 1 (1980), pp. 65–91. 56 Tanwar, Reporting the Partition of Punjab 1947, p. 97. 57 Ibid., p. 97. 58 Tribune (Simla), 18 November, 1947. 59 Tribune (Simla), 13 December, 1947.

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acquisition in September 1947 of nearly nineteen-hundred acres of land in the Montgomery district out of evacuee property.60 Some indication of the scale of official corruption in East Punjab, can be gleaned from its Pakistan neighbour. The West Punjab AntiCorruption Department reported in September 1952, that during its three years of operation it had dealt with over 500 cases involving civil servants.61 This figure may in fact just be the tip of the iceberg. It is unlikely that incidences were significantly lower on the Indian side of the border. With respect to the latter, in May 1951, for example, four persons working in Amritsar’s assistant Custodian of Evacuee Property office were charged with the misappropriation of 12 tolas of gold that had formed part of the property recovered from abandoned Muslim houses. The accused included an advocate and a treasury clerk.62 This pervading atmosphere, together with the delays arising from inter-dominion disputes over the value of abandoned property, made the processes of securing compensation traumatically long-winded. When cases were resolved, it was often so late in the day that a sense of resentment towards the state was more prevalent than one of gratitude. This may explain at least in part the silence of refugees with respect to the compensatory processes involving abandoned evacuee property. On the other hand, those who were politically well connected could speed through the bureaucratic process and turn the prevailing dislocation to their advantage. Hints of this are provided in the accounts by the Lal family of Karolbagh, Delhi. But again in such ‘irregular’ circumstances, there may be a reluctance to acknowledge state intervention. What is more difficult to explain is the silence which lies at the heart of accounts like Sardar Charan Singh Bhatia, when state support also took the form of employment preference. Ravinder Kaur has intriguingly raised the issue of Untouchable perceptions in her work on Punjabi resettlement in Delhi. There, as elsewhere, the state treated Untouchables as forming a separate refugee category. Chamar migrants from Lahore were provided with mud huts in a pre-existing Harijan colony called Rehgar Pura near Karol Bagh. ‘They were, as was the norm, given jobs as sweepers with

60 Mamdot was a refugee himself, who according to both opponents and the Punjab Governor Mudie, personally intervened in the allotment processes to reward his supporters. He became increasingly embroiled in factional conflicts with the Finance Minister, Mian Mumtaz Daultana. 61 Dawn (Karachi), 29 September, 1952. 62 Civil and Military Gazette (Lahore), 17 May, 1951.

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the municipality or encouraged to set up shop as shoemakers’.63 Thus maintenance of the traditional caste hierarchy was accompanied by poorer provision of facilities. Untouchables were at the bottom of the pecking order when it came to both accommodation and employment preferences for refugees. Nevertheless, although the assistance they received from the state was ‘paltry’, it was the first time that they had received any systematic support. In their testimonies, ‘the credit for their social and economic success is duly given to the government. This is something that is often avoided by the upper caste Hindus since it challenges the myth of their own role in successful refugee resettlement’.64 More research is required. Nonetheless, the evidence which is emerging is that those Punjabi refugees who received the poorest state provision are in fact most likely in their testimonies to reproduce the official state discourse on resettlement as it is provided in such narratives as Millions on the Move and The Story of Rehabilitation.

Conclusion The refugee problem threatened social order and the dislocation of caste, class and gender hierarchies. For this reason the early postindependence Indian state devoted considerable resources to deal with the situation in its most acute form involving Punjabi migrants. It also sought to legitimize itself in dealing with the humanitarian issues arising from mass migration. The securing of moral authority through the rehabilitation process was significant, given the earlier failure to protect minority rights and the complicity of officials in the massacres which sparked the migrations. The production of official accounts such as The Story of Rehabilitation was crucial to this legitimization process. While such writings produced a standardized account of refugee experience which diverges from a far more complex reality, they were not merely rhetorical productions, given the large amount of resources devoted at national and state level with respect to the Punjab refugee crisis. The recent emergence of oral based accounts has provided a diametrically opposing narrative of the rehabilitation process in which the state is conspicuously absent. Both psychological needs and the restoration of community pride called for understandings which played 63 64

Kaur, Since 1947, p. 173. Ibid., p. 172.

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down state agency and emphasized personal autonomy. The colonially constructed stereotype of Punjabi pride, courage and self-reliance provided a ‘myth’ with which to inform first hand accounts. At the same time, the culture of corruption encouraged the silences surrounding the state in personal narratives. It reduced the effectiveness of state provision for many refugees. Simultaneously its existence created embarrassment for those who flourished in this environment through their utilization of wealth and political connections. The temptation to hide these personal details by passing down a community influenced memory of self-reliance cannot be overlooked by oral historians. Finally it is important to acknowledge that the overwhelming upper class character of oral testimonies may have exaggerated the downsizing of the state’s role in the ‘history from beneath’ of rehabilitation. Wealthier refugees were not only more likely to buy into the Punjabi myths of self-reliance, but to have the most to hide in terms of their dealings with the state. Poor migrants on the contrary had little power or ability to access the state on their own terms. They were, to put it bluntly, in no position to bribe officials to ease the rehabilitation process. Yet, however ‘paltry’ and discriminatory was the state’s response to their needs, it represented, especially for Untouchables, a radical break with the past. They had nothing to lose by acknowledging their gratitude for this assistance. It is thus likely that if further recovery of the Untouchable experience of the aftermath of partition is undertaken, the yawning chasm between the official and first hand accounts of the rehabilitation process may be somewhat narrowed.

C Cambridge University Press 2010 Modern Asian Studies 45, 1 (2011) pp. 131–157.  doi:10.1017/S0026749X1000034X

Sovereignty, Governmentality and Development in Ayub’s Pakistan: the Case of Korangi Township∗ M ARKUS DAECHSEL Department of History, Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham, Surrey TW20 0EX, UK Email: [email protected] Abstract This paper uses a historical ethnography of the construction of Korangi Township outside Karachi to analyse the configuration of power in the post-colonial Pakistani state of the late 1950s and 1960s. Foucault’s distinction between ‘sovereign’, ‘disciplinary’ and ‘security’ power helps to reveal how possibilities of non-interventionist control were deliberately discarded in favour of an (often theatrical) exercise of ‘raw’ power. The way in which the township was conceived by the international architect and city planner, C. A. Doxiadis, often stood in contrast and tension with the ways in which it was executed by General Ayub Khan’s military regime (1958–1968). Rapid early success—tens of thousands of refugee slum dwellers were resettled within six months—went hand-in-hand with equally-quick failure and abandonment later on. The Pakistani regime was only interested in demonstrating its ability to make decisions and to deploy executive power over its territory, but it made no sustained effort to use spatial control to entangle its subjects in a web of ‘governmentality’. In the final analysis, the post-colonial Pakistani state was a ‘state of exception’ made permanent, which deliberately enacted development failure to underscore its overreliance on sovereign power.

Introduction The politics around the construction of Korangi Township in Karachi offer an excellent access point to a better understanding of the inner workings of the post-colonial Pakistani state in the late 1950s and 1960s. It was very much an ‘everyday’ project, in the sense that it ∗ I am grateful for the research funding received from a British Academy Small Research Grant and the Carnegie Endowment for Scottish Universities. Special thanks also to Klairi Mavragani and Giota Pavlidou for their assistance at the Constaninos A. Doxiadis Archives (CADA), Athens.

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affected the ‘everyday’ lives of ordinary and mostly poor refugees as they had to create meaningful habitats around concrete plinths, asbestos cement sheets and communal water taps. But Korangi was also an extraordinary spectacle. It was one of the most important development projects of the Ayub period and was heralded in the international media as the largest mass housing initiative in Asia. Its short-term success was emblematic for what a military regime could do in a country with a dismal track record of state efficiency.1 Presidents of the United States, European royalty and international development experts all came to visit and admire. Above everything, Korangi came to demonstrate how deeply the local and ‘everyday state’ in Pakistan was intertwined with the national and international ‘state’. Research into the nature of the postcolonial state in Pakistan has remained largely untouched by recent advances in the study of the state in South Asia more generally. A substantial literature about various aspects of Pakistani politics does of course exist—particularly in the fields of civil-military relations, elite politics, International Relations and security studies2 —but it tends to be top-down in its orientation, and often lacks historical depth as well as radical theoretical incisiveness. More specifically, a narrative overridden with nostalgia still overshadows interpretations of the first martial law period. According to the mainstream view, Ayub’s regime may have been undemocratic, increasingly corrupt, and beholden to the United States, but it also ended a decade of inactivity, democratic failure and zero ‘development’. The military ushered in something of a ‘golden age’: the first ‘proper’ Five-Year Plans drawn up by a new generation of Pakistani planners and bureaucrats; the building of a new capital city in Islamabad; the cotton and jute boom; and the rise of a ‘new middle class’ in countryside and city. There was optimism and international respect. A middle-ranking bureaucrat or army officer could afford a Mercedes Benz from Europe; one could still have a civilized gin and tonic in Faletti’s Hotel, and Pakistan International Airlines flight 1 For instance ‘Pakistan Progress under Military Rule’ The Times, 23 October, 1959. For celebratory pictures see ibid., 4 November, 1960. 2 Recent and important contributions include Mohammad Waseem, Politics and the State in Pakistan, 1st edn (Lahore, Pakistan: Progressive Publishers, 1989); Saeed Shafqat, Civil-Military Relations in Pakistan: From Zulfikar Ali Bhutto to Benazir Bhutto (Boulder: Westview Press 1997); Seyyed Vali Reza Nasr, Islamic Leviathan: Islam and the Making of State Power (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); Ilhan Niaz, An Inquiry into the Culture of Power of the Subcontinent (Islamabad: Alhamra, 2006), Hasan Askari Rizvi, Military, State, and Society in Pakistan (New York: St Martin’s Press, 2000); Farzana Shaikh, Making Sense of Pakistan (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009).

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attendants wore uniforms designed by Pierre Cardin. If Ayub had to step down in the end, it was not so much because he had failed, but because he had changed too much, and was unable to manage the fruits of his own success.3 The interpretation of Korangi Township offered in this paper raises important doubts about this standard narrative: the fate of the township, as we shall see, was not so much a case of the development dream gone sour, but rather an example of pre-designed failure, which calls for a fundamental reinterpretation of the very developmentalist impulse so often propounded by Ayub’s regime. While sharing the ‘everyday’ orientation of this special issue, I wish to use the case study of Korangi Township to engage Pakistan research with new approaches to the state that have been influenced by readings of Michel Foucault. I have in mind both an older debate around ideas of (colonial) ‘governmentality’ and a more recent focus—following in the wake of Agamben and the Carl Schmitt revival—on sovereignty, violence and theatricality. Foucault therefore—in particular as he appears in his lectures to the Collège de France, which have been made available in full only very recently and are just beginning to filter down into South Asian studies—features prominently in what is to follow. But unlike other recent engagements with this material,4 I do not wish to offer a rigorous ‘Foucauldian’ analysis; rather the aim is to see whether Foucault can provide a vocabulary to disentangle the various webs of power that made up the Pakistani state in the period under review. This will allow us to formulate the ‘problem’ of the Pakistani state in a sharper way: what exactly is the relationship between the ‘local’ and the ‘international’, its ‘inside’ and its ‘outside’, its ‘strength’ and its ‘weakness’? ‘Weak’ governmentality and ‘raw’ sovereignty The topic of at least three of Foucault’s lecture cycles in the late 1970s5 was how state power has changed in Western Europe since 3 For example, Shahid Javed Burki, Pakistan: A Nation in the Making (Oxford University Press, 1986); Pakistan: Fifty Years of Nationhood, 3rd edn (Boulder: Westview Press, 1999); Omar Noman, Pakistan: A Political and Economic History since 1947, Rev. and updated edn (London, New York: Kegan Paul International, 1990). 4 For an impressively rigorous, albeit somewhat mechanistic, example in the field of city planning see Stephen Legg, Spaces of Colonialism: Delhi’s Urban Governmentalities (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2007). 5 (New York: Picador, 2003), Michel Foucault et al., Society Must Be Defended : Lectures at the Collège De France, 1975–76, Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège De France, 1977–1978 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), Michel

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the middle ages, and how this change has entailed different ways of controlling people. Foucault sketched three broad modes of control and linked them to distinct phases in history: first, there is juridical or sovereign power, to prescribe through law and punish through violence. Second, disciplinary power, based on distinctions between normal and abnormal that aims at the continuous regulation of all aspects of daily life. Finally there is ‘security’ (later renamed ‘governmentality’6 ). This last form of power takes perceived ill-effects as naturally ‘given’—rather than as deviations to be punished or quarantined—and manages them with scientific ‘techniques [that] are at once enlightened, reflected, analytical, calculated and calculating’.7 Its object is ‘population’, which is not ‘transparent’ to sovereign action. Unlike the objects of sovereign and disciplinary power, the sinner, rebel or deviant, ‘population’ must be allowed to behave according to its own volition (‘desire’), and can neither be comprehensively surveyed nor commandeered from above.8 Foucault was always at pains to point out that, at least from the nineteenth century onwards, the three modes of power reinforced rather than succeeded each other. But there is still a larger historical storyline at play that poses the problem of the state as a paradox: Why is it that the exercise of state power through modern and non-interventionist methods of ‘security’ (or ‘governmentality’) can be more effective than the much more directly coercive and interventionist methods of older regimes? This question offers an immediate point of connection for those interested in the nature of colonial states as they are facing the corresponding question of how a small number of Europeans, with limited means of coercion, managed to rule over millions of potentially hostile ‘others’. In a reading that often falsely conflates ‘governmentality’ with ‘disciplinary’ power,9 South Asianist ‘Foucauldians’ have identified a whole range of institutions such as prisons, schools, mental asylums, medical Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège De France, 1978–79 (Basingstoke Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). 6 Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, p. 108. 7 Ibid., p. 71. 8 Ibid., pp. 70–72. 9 This is the result of Foucault’s own shifty usage, which becomes clearer only when considering his lecture cycle as a whole. Much of the reception prior to 2007 derives the meaning of ‘governmentality’ exclusively from Lecture 4 (1 February, 1978) which is the only one to have been widely circulated before the recent publication of the entire lecture cycle. For instance, in Michel Foucault, Power, Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984 (New York: New Press, 2000), pp. 201–222. Unlike the others, Lecture 4 downplays the juxtaposition of disciplinary and ‘security’ power.

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knowledge, and the census and statistics more generally to find an explanation of how the colonialists could rule, without having to consider any form of active consent on behalf of the ruled.10 But it was also clear that such an argument would not work easily. Although many institutions of disciplinary and ‘security’ power could be found in colonial India, they were often under-funded with insufficient means to cover more than a small proportion of the subject population. Statistics were left to accumulate dust on official shelves, while ‘sciences of government’ were often not fully internalized and used ornamentally.11 This ‘weakness’ connects the governmentality problematic with neo-Schmittian readings of political power that have come to the debate from the opposite direction. Recent interventions in political anthropology have shown not only that ‘sovereign’ power—the power to maim and kill—remains fundamental to South Asian statehood, but also that the exercise of this kind of power is by no means a ‘state’ monopoly.12 Contested hierarchies of many ‘sovereign bodies’ continued to survive into the colonial and even post-colonial era in the behaviour of local strongmen, bureaucrats, religious notables and mobilized crowds. British colonial rule aspired to monopoly sovereignty according to European norms and sought to impose it 10 Notable examples include (in addition to those quoted elsewhere in this paper) Gyan Prakash, Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1999), Satadru Sen, Disciplining Punishment: Colonialism and Convict Society in the Andaman Islands (New Delhi, Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), Colonial Childhoods: The Juvenile Periphery of India, 1850–1945, Anthem South Asian Studies (London: Anthem Press, 2005), Clare Anderson, Legible Bodies: Race, Criminality, and Colonialism in South Asia (Oxford, New York: Berg, 2004), David Arnold, Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth-Century India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), Sarah Hodges, Contraception, Colonialism and Commerce: Birth Control in South India, 1920–1940 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008); For similar approaches outside South Asia see Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). 11 For an up-to-date account and bibliography of this debate see Legg, Spaces of Colonialism, pp. 18–25. 12 In a general context see the critique of Foucault in Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer. Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998). For a collection of important new approaches to the problem of sovereignty in South Asia see Thomas Blom Hansen and Finn Stepputat, States of Imagination: Ethnographic Explorations of the Postcolonial State (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), Sovereign Bodies: Citizens, Migrants, and States in the Postcolonial World (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2005). For Africa, see J. A. Mbembé, On the Postcolony (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).

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in theatrical acts of violence—the 1857 ‘mutineers’ being blown off canons, the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, or the aerial bombardment of troublesome Pathans in Malakand. But increasingly effective ways of symbolically or actually ‘transferring’ power away from the Raj to local challengers remained ever present.13 All political mass movements of the late colonial period used techniques like civil disobedience, hartals or ultimatums, which were always less about the achievement of concrete political aims than about attacking and undermining the colonial claim to rule itself. In the case of the Pakistan movement, a ‘naked’ politics of counter-sovereignty had become especially dominant—virtually at the exclusion of all else— because such a politics could hide the many contradictions that a more coherent focus on positive political content would have brought out into the open.14 This inheritance posed a stark problem after independence. The nationalist regimes hoped and demanded that politics would now turn into the issue-based, conversational and ‘orderly’ mode prevalent in legitimate democracies; a mode in which the theatrical excess and dispersal of sovereign power had been tamed and constitutionally monopolized in a rhetoric of ‘people’s sovereignty’. For Foucault, such containment became possible in nineteenth− century Europe only through the emergence of ‘society’—a web of disciplinary powers, which turned people into governable entities.15 But such a project was never successful in South Asia. Even after states like India and Pakistan had ostensibly become fully ‘self-determined’, their people continued to stage sovereignty contests in which state sovereignty as such was put into question, for instance in ‘communalist’ attacks, in a politics of religious outrage and other violent traditions of ‘political society’, or in the self-consciously ‘regal’ antics of neighbourhood 13 Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘“In the Name of Politics”: Sovereignty, Democracy and the Multitude in India’, in Nathalie Karagiannis and Peter Wagner (eds), Varieties of World-Making: Beyond Globalization (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2008), pp. 115–124; Markus Daechsel, The Politics of Self-Expression: The Urdu Middle-Class Milieu in Mid-Twentieth Century India and Pakistan, Royal Asiatic Society Books (London, New York: Routledge, 2006), pp. 67–75. 14 Daechsel, The Politics of Self-Expression, pp. 75–81. Also (in a different context) in Ayesha Jalal, The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim League, and the Demand for Pakistan, Cambridge South Asian Studies. no. 31 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Shaikh, Making Sense of Pakistan, pp. 46–80. 15 He made this argument before developing the concept of ‘governmentality’. Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, pp. 37–50. For an application to the present context see Chakrabarty, ‘In the Name of Politics’, pp. 129–131.

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bosses and provincial strongmen.16 It was this combination of ‘raw’ sovereignty and a persistent weakness of ‘governmentality’ that gave the ultimate source of state sovereignty—the declaration of a ‘state of exception’ or ‘national emergency’—a recurring role in South Asian cultures of power.17 When General Ayub Khan staged a coup d’état in 1958, for instance, his regime attempted to trump the alternative ‘sovereign bodies’ that had constituted themselves in political action all around Pakistan with a more permanent sovereignty of a higher order. As the following discussion will show, the Korangi project was intimately connected to the act of the coup d’état itself and, for this reason alone, deserves an important place within the problematic of a post-colonial governmentality. The fact that Korangi was a project in urban reconstruction is not coincidental here, because it relates directly to another one of Foucault’s observations about the nature of sovereign power: its primary focus on territory, which it acquired with the emergence of the modern state in the Renaissance. ‘Sovereignty capitalizes a territory’, Foucault observed more specifically, after discussing the building of a new capital city as the quintessential manifestation of sovereign power in the field of urban planning.18 This has immediate and important resonances for the present discussion, as the Korangi project was closely linked—both in terms of politics and in terms of planning discourse—with ‘capitalization’ par excellence, the design of a new Pakistani capital city in Islamabad. Taken together, both projects marked a crucial step to transform ‘Pakistan’ from a state of sovereignty that existed only in a mobilized community to a sovereign State within internationally recognized territorial borders. The problem of territory was particularly poignant, as up to the very moment of state foundation itself, Pakistani nationalism had in many 16 See Partha Chatterjee, ‘On Civil and Political Society in Post-Colonial Democracies’, in Sudipta Kaviraj and Sunil Khilnani (eds), Civil Society: History and Possibilities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 165–178; The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World, Leonard Hastings Schoff Memorial Lectures (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004); Oskar Verkaaik, Migrants and Militants: Fun and Urban Violence in Pakistan, Princeton Studies in Muslim Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004); Thomas Blom Hansen, Wages of Violence: Naming and Identity in Postcolonial Bombay (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001). 17 For an anthropological account of emergency in India see Emma Tarlo, Unsettling Memories: Narratives of the Emergency in Delhi (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). 18 Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, p. 20.

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ways been strongly de-territorialized. While the precise geographic shape and location of ‘Pakistan’ was much contested and often fanciful, a sense of national community was powerfully and clearly instantiated in experiences which were not clearly bound in space—in communal aggression, in collective self-empowerment and in mass violence.19 The people who had to pay the highest price for this ‘de-territorialized’ quality of the nation were the millions of refugees who suddenly found their homes to be in the wrong place after Pakistan had been thrown into a defined geographic existence. The Korangi township was first and foremost dedicated to them, and was, therefore, an initiative of re-territorialization of fundamental importance for the very existence of the new state.20

Potemkin comes to Pakistan The Korangi project—the construction of a satellite town for several hundred thousands of residents southeast of Karachi—was the largest slum clearance and urban rehabilitation measure in Asia of its time, and the most spectacular single ‘development’ initiative by a Pakistani government since the country’s foundation in 1947. Within weeks after General Ayub Khan’s military take-over in October 1958, a site was selected, funding secured from US AID and the Ford Foundation, and a foreign consultancy firm contracted. By the summer of 1959 the first batch of 15,000 housing units was complete, and by the winter of the same year General Ayub ceremoniously handed over the keys to the first residents.21 Heralded as the showpiece of a new commitment to ‘modernisation’, Korangi was immediately put on the itinerary of foreign dignitaries and journalists visiting Pakistan, including Ayub’s most powerful foreign patron, US President Eisenhower, who visited in late 1959.22

19

Daechsel, The Politics of Self-Expression, pp. 67–75. Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar, The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia: Refugees, Boundaries, Histories (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), pp. 78–119. 21 ‘Foreign Aid for Korangi Scheme’ Dawn, 16 November, 1958; also 3 December, 1958; 6 January, 1959; 18 January, 1959; 9 March, 1959; 10 April, 1959; Sunday magazine specials, 17 May, 1959 and 31 May 1959; For context, see Sarah Ansari, Life after Partition: Migration, Community and Strife in Sindh, 1947–1962 (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 181–91. 22 Dawn, 7 December, 1959. 20

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In the first instance, Korangi was designed as the corner stone of a massive refugee rehabilitation scheme. The vast majority of Urdu-speaking Muslims leaving the Indian Union for Pakistan over the decade following Partition chose to settle in the urban areas of Sind. Their arrival transformed Karachi, formerly a trading centre of modest size, into a metropolis of one and a half million inhabitants, triggering an unprecedented housing crisis.23 The creation of designated refugee colonies by various Pakistani state agencies prior to Ayub’s coup d’etat had largely remained a failure, particularly with respect to the economically weak. Virtually all of the first 50,000 families to occupy Korangi had eked out a precarious existence in refugee camps, in slum clusters in the very heart of Karachi, and in derelict housing properties left behind by Hindu refugees migrating in the opposite direction.24 But the new township was meant to be more than just another colony for the urban poor. Designed to provide all civic facilities and readily available places of employment in a designated industrial area, the new development was expected to attract middle-class and professional families of mixed backgrounds to grow in due course into a ‘balanced’ and relatively self-contained urban community.25 The record-time in which the first housing units—in fact, mass manufactured ‘shells’—were shown off to the world concealed the fact that the provision of even the most basic amenities lagged far behind settlement. Both Ayub’s government and international consultants were clearly aware of this basic flaw right from the start,26 but decided to ignore it for the sake of short-term propaganda value. Behind the impressive prospect of row upon row of neat and tidy concrete houses, there was an absence or shortage of all basic necessities of life. Water was only available from improvised community

23 Ansari, Life after Partition, pp. 124–144. For the wider historical context see Yasmin Khan, The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan (New Haven, London: Yale University Press, 2007). 24 S.A.A.B. Rizvi, ‘Findings on the socio economic and housing survey of the central flat areas of Karachi 1960’. Pakistan Institute of Ekistics, Archive File 20191: CADA; Dox PA 17, Development of the Korangi Area 2/6/1959: CADA, PakVol. 14, p. 419– 422. 25 Ibid., p. 428; Karachi Development Authority, The Greater Karachi Resettlement Housing Programme, January 1961, p. 10. 26 ‘Pakistan Housing’ TOICA 901, 24/12/1958, United States National Archives (USNA), Box 9: RG469, Records of the Foreign Assistance Agencies, Deputy Director’s Office, Near East Central Files, Pakistan Subject Files, 1952–58.

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taps.27 For years to come there was no sewage system, and until the very end of the project no electricity supply.28 Several fully occupied houses got badly damaged in the first monsoon because storm water drainage had not been completed.29 Most importantly, transport connections to Karachi remained hopelessly inadequate. Teachers, doctors and businessmen could not be persuaded to take up their work in what was increasingly seen as an urban wasteland miles from the city. Although the local industrial area did turn out to be a longterm success, it could only grow at a time-lag of several years after the first residents had arrived. Faced with immediate unemployment or with having to spend a much higher proportion of their meagre income on commuting to Karachi, many local residents decided to sell their allotted houses on the black market and move back to city-centre slums. The vision of attracting middle-class and upperclass residents never found any takers at all.30 The planned leasepurchase system of houses collapsed within the first two years of the new township’s existence, when the collection of instalments from dissatisfied residents dropped close to zero. One of the guiding ideas behind the project, that it would be self-funding, had turned out to be unrealistic.31 Despite its great enthusiasm for the project at the start, Ayub’s government made no serious financial or policy commitment to save Korangi. Despite its professed enthusiasm for physical and economic planning, the regime never dedicated more than a single officer on partial loan from the Karachi Development Authority to the project. The grand-sounding National Housing and Settlements Agency that was formally in charge of Korangi was essentially a paper institution, set up solely for the purpose of attracting Ford Foundation funding. Instead, the foreign contractor, who had designed the township and accounted for almost all real planning activity on the ground, was shouldered with the responsibility for failure. When designated aid from foreign sources finally ran out in 1964, all further 27 C-PKH 2381 24/1/61, C-PKH 2667 24/3/61, C-PKH 2875 20/4/61: CADA PakVol. 107; C-PKH 4688 28/6/62: CADA PakVol. 154. 28 C-PKH 2906: CADA PakVol. 108; C-PKH 4054: CADA PakVol. 153; Letter West Pakistan Government Hospital (Korangi) to KDA [date missing] Pakistan Correspondence C-PKH 5663–6095, May–August 1963: CADA PakVol. 187. 29 C-Pak KH 7079, 19/8/1964: CADA PakVol. 213. 30 C-PKH 2660 24/3/1961 Progress of Activities in Social Planning for February 1961: CADA PakVol. 107. S.A.A.B.; Rizvi, ‘Findings’, p. 85. 31 ‘Demand and Collection in Korangi (Arif)’ C-PKH 5047 13/10/1962: CADA ‘Archive File’ 17928. C-Pak KH 6800 7/5/1964 ‘Comments on the Cost Analysis of the Greater Karachi Resettlement Programme’: CADA PakVol. 213.

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government commitment was terminated.32 Korangi did not cease to exist as a place of urban habitation—as we shall see, it cannot even easily be described as a long-term failure—but its remaining and future inhabitants were largely left to fend for themselves. Although designed to be a long-term development project in line with the large-scale urban reconstruction efforts carried out by many governments after the Second World War, Korangi was never more than of short-term importance to the major players involved in its creation. The project was conceived when both the new military government in Pakistan and its sponsors in Washington felt under immense pressure to demonstrate their ability to act whilst otherwise occupying weak positions on the ground. By the time of Ayub’s take-over, US-aid policy had come under intense domestic pressure. A Democrat-dominated legislature aggressively questioned whether development aid in general, and largess towards Pakistan in particular, was in the national interest. Some suggested an increase in aid to India at Pakistan’s expense, others were doubtful about supporting military dictatorships. Moreover, the United States agencies directly involved in the dispensation of aid in Pakistan came under intense scrutiny and had to defend themselves against charges of inefficiency, corruption and misuse of funds.33 If the Eisenhower administration was to continue its financial commitment to Pakistan, Ayub would have to demonstrate that he was capable of delivering. The Korangi project was a perfect opportunity, not only because visible results could be achieved in a relatively short time, but also because the field of urban reconstruction transcended objections from powerful lobbyists on Capitol Hill. Other flagship development projects had attracted opposition in the past. Agricultural modernization was advocated by development experts, but blocked by the farming lobby as an increase in Pakistani food grain production would eventually undercut US export profits.34 Similarly,

32 Dox PAK LH 18, 16/5/64, Rehabilitation of Low Income shelterless families in West Pakistan: CADA PakVol. 199. 33 Dawn 9 April, 1959; George Meader, ‘Our Foreign Aid Program—a Bureaucratic Nightmare’, Reader’s Digest, April 1957. Also Hearings before a Subcommittee of the Committee on Government Operations, House of Representatives, Eighty-Fifth Congress, Second Session, Part II, pp. 1059–1071: USNA RG233. 34 ICA advisor Robert Clifford, for instance, wanted more agricultural development but no steel mill, ‘Telegram State to Karachi’ 30 July, 1957, Box 9; similarly Audit Report to the Congress of the United States: United States Assistance Program for Pakistan, International Cooperation Administration, Department of State, 1955, p. 5, Box 15.

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Pakistani initiatives in prestige heavy industries, such as shipbuilding and steel, had faltered under the opposition of sceptical geo-strategists and disgruntled US industrialists who feared that most of the lucrative contracts would go to European suppliers.35 The ‘rehabilitation’ of the urban poor, in contrast, fitted well into an established international discourse of post-war planning and could be tied in effortlessly with Cold War horror scenarios of Soviet encroachment. If Korangi could be seen as the right project at the right time for the US administration, it was also an excellent short-term gap-filler in terms of domestic Pakistani politics. Pakistan had been in economic meltdown for some time. Ever since the collapse of world market prices for agricultural commodities after the Korean War boom in the early 1950s, the country had faced an ever-increasing problem of dwindling foreign exchange reserves. Successive governments responded to the crisis by the drastic curtailment of imports. As a result, industry was crippled because of its inability to get raw materials, spare parts or new investment goods. Urban unemployment rose, while the ordinary consumer found it impossible to procure even basic imported commodities such as toothpaste and soap on the market.36 The only serious foreign exchange earner for Pakistan proved to be its geo-strategic position. In a process that directly facilitated a predominant political role for the armed forces, the Pakistani elite traded membership in anti-communist military alliances for expanding US development aid, which by the second half of the decade directly or indirectly paid for a large part of the country’s imports of consumer goods.37 Ayub’s regime had assumed power under widespread popular approval with the promise that ‘non-political’ military men were more capable than civilians of solving Pakistan’s economic problems. The contrary view was powerfully expressed by Rep. Passman, Chairman of Foreign Operations Subcommittee on House Appropriations Committee, ‘Confidential Comments on Foreign Aid Programme’, 26 October, 1955: USNA RG469 Pakistan Subject Files, 1952–1958, File ‘Pakistan programs’, Box 12. 35 Meeting Notes on German and US Steel Industry in Pakistan 14 September, 1953, Magis, Ed Dahl, SOA, Jo Drake, Larry Nahai; USNA, Box 1. 36 Karachi Dispatch 468, 26 January, 1955: USNA, File Pakistan—programs 1955– 1956, RG469 Pakistan Subject Files, 1952–58, Box 12. Letter ‘AKA’, Dawn, 1 January, 1958; Letter ‘A Trader’, Dawn, 1 February, 1959, p. 7; also see Noman, Pakistan, pp. 15–21. 37 Ernest F. Fisk’s farewell assessment, Lahore Despatch 165, 3 May, 1957: USNA File—Pakistan Programs Evaluation, RG469 Pakistan Subject Files, 1952–58, Box 13. For a more detailed discussion of the history of this development see Ayesha Jalal, ‘The State of Martial Rule: The Origins of Pakistan’s Political Economy of Defence’, Cambridge South Asian Studies, No, 46 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

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In reality, Ayub’s regime had no such capability. The Pakistani state in the early Ayub period remained essentially a theatrical edifice. While the newspaper pages filled up with accounts of almost continuous travel by key ministers and their proclamations of farreaching policy changes, basic constraints remained as intractable as ever. Like any other Pakistani government before or after, Ayub’s regime was unable to significantly increase the very limited taxraising powers of the state, or affect meaningful land reform to boost agricultural output. Being equally unable to address the immediate problems of high inflation and shortage of basic consumer goods, Ayub embarked on a highly publicized ‘moral economy’ crusade. All economic problems were blamed on the character flaws of scrupulous speculators, smugglers and black-marketers who could be publicly punished, while soldiers patrolled the markets and criminalized the sale of commodities above hastily imposed price ceilings.38

Ready-made ‘governmentality’, façon grecque The foreign consultancy firm behind the Korangi project was Athensbased Doxiadis Associates (DA), founded and run by the urban theorist, architect and international salesman, Constantinos A. Doxiadis, who retained hands-on control. His many activities in Pakistan included not only the Korangi project, but also his lifetime magnum opus—the design of the new capital, Islamabad, which was also contracted shortly after Ayub’s coup d’etat. Doxiadis was amongst the very first development consultants to operate on a commercial basis and on a global scale. His firm was active in more than 20 countries, with significant commissions awarded in Ghana, the US, Greece, Pakistan and Iraq.39 Doxiadis owed his success largely to his closeness to the Ford Foundation, which funded even his more fanciful projects without asking too many questions,40 and his contacts 38 Dawn, 1 January, 1959; 20 January, 1959; 2 March, 1959; 7 March, 1959; 21 March, 1959. 39 For the best recent account see Ray Bromley, ‘Towards Global Human Settlements: Constantinos Doxiadis as Entrepreneur, Coalition-Builder and Visionary’, in Joe Nasr and Mercedes Volait (eds) Urbanism: Imported or Exported? (Chichester, New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2003), pp. 316–340. 40 Jean Kim, ‘C. A. Doxiadis and the Funding of the Ecumenopolis’, unpublished conference paper, Space and Progress—Ekistics and the Global Context of post-World War II Urbanization and Architecture, Athens, 1–2 December, 2006.

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in Washington, DC, going back to his time as Deputy Minister of Reconstruction in Greece during the civil war with the communists. His planning discourse was developed in careful contradistinction to other forms of urbanism at the time—particularly to Le Corbusier’s uncompromising (and often seen as left-leaning) espousal of the values of modernization—but also to attempts that advocated a return to vernacular traditions. As Doxiadis himself was only too aware, he was competing in a market place of development packages, and what was to make his own designs attractive to Third World governments and their metropolitan sponsors, was precisely that he promised to give due space and importance to both ‘modernity’ and ‘tradition’.41 Doxiadis began with the assumption that any planning practice had to take a comprehensive view of all aspects of human activity (which he called ‘Ekistics’). This gave his discourse a strong interdisciplinary and developmentalist character.42 An important aspect of this approach was an exercise in surveying which would have to take into account not only geography, demographics, economics and architecture, but also— and extensively so—history, cultural traditions and religious life. In the case of Iraq, for instance, where DA was to draw up master plans for virtually all towns of moderate and large size, a veritable archive of facts had been carefully put together.43 Although somewhat less effort had gone into this activity in Pakistan, Doxiadis and his staff had also prepared extensive notes and photograph collections during several fact-finding trips to the country, which not only covered local and historical architectural styles, but also philosophical ruminations about the folk culture and national character of Pakistanis in the different regions of the country. Statistical analysis and textual engagement aside, it was through a careful reading of physical clues that the natural behaviour of local people could be established. The way local residents colonized the roadside or back-lanes, the traces of an unauthorized path trodden across designated green spaces, the colour of washing hung out to dry, the splash-puddles next to the communal water tap, and so on—all of this represented evidence to be photographed and decoded.44 41 C. A. Doxiadis ‘The Arab Metropolis’, lecture delivered at the Seminar on ‘The New Metropolis in the Arab World’ sponsored by the Congress of Cultural Freedom, Cairo 18–23 December, 1960. CADA, General Reports R-GA 211. 42 Constantinos A. Doxiadis, Ekistics: An Introduction to the Science of Human Settlements (London: Hutchinson, 1968), pp. 44–56. 43 For example, Reports R-QA 790–821, November 1957: CADA, Iraq Vol. 63. 44 One amongst many examples is Doxiadis’ reading of Le Corbusier’s grand project: Dox PP 78 Report on Chandi Garh, February 1956, CADA: PakVol. 6.

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Both the nature of this data and Doxiadis’s attitude to its use conformed to Foucault’s notion of ‘population’—the designated object of ‘security’ which is managed rather than controlled. The overriding aim was precisely to capture the ‘natural’ characteristics of the target constituency as closely as possible. Doxiadis emphasized above all else that all meaningful planning activity had to work with the natural ‘desires’—climatic, cultural, religious—of the people it was meant to serve. If the blueprint of the planner failed to calculate and anticipate such needs, a project would fail. Although often in favour of mass production and big interventions in practice, Doxiadis was intellectually indebted to the Edinburgh polymath and founding father of regional planning, Patrick Geddes.45 In his work on and in British India, the latter had always been very scathing of slum clearance and instead advocated a minimalist approach that gently directed local initiatives where absolutely necessary.46 Similarly for Doxiadis, mass housing in poor countries could only be successful—both from a practical and a financial point of view—if it was restricted to the bare minimum. He did not advocate the provision of complete dwellings to the poor, only of ‘shells’—basic mass-produced enclosures that would be open to alterations and extensions as the local residents deemed fit.47 It was precisely this non-interventionist tone, always at pains to stress the importance of self-help and local activism, that made Doxiadis a trusted name amongst his conservative-liberal sponsors in the United States. As he put it primarily for their benefit in the propaganda material that he delivered ready-made to the Pakistani authorities: Well-planned human settlements are more than houses, roads and buildings. They are real communities where people can live happily, enjoying traditional ways of life. They represent a systematic effort to create a healthy community and a physical and social environment strengthening individual growth and family development. In building healthy, well-balanced communities with adequate social planning instrumentalities, we build a healthy future for Pakistan.48 45 The most direct link existed in the person of Jacqueline Tyrwhitt, one of the most important popularizers of Geddes’s ideas. She was also one of Doxiadis’ closest collaborators and editor of his ‘house journal’ Ekistics. 46 See Patrick Geddes and Jaqueline Tyrwhitt, Patrick Geddes in India (London: L. Humphries, 1947); for a case study see Markus Daechsel, ‘De-Urbanizing the City: Colonial Cognition and the People of Lahore’, in Ian Talbot and Shinder Thandi (eds) People on the Move: Punjabi Colonial and Post-Colonial Migration (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 21–44, especially p. 29. 47 C-PKH 3130 2-6-1961: CADA, PakVol. 108. 48 Karachi Development Authority, The Greater Karachi Resettlement Housing Programme, January 1961, p. 10: CADA.

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The second fundamental dictum in Doxiadis’s planning discourse was that ongoing modernization entailed ongoing urbanization, which, if left unchecked, would lead to civilizational crisis. Not only would the growth of cities eventually make them choke to death on their own traffic, increasing exposure to the glittering world of the motorcar and the aeroplane would bring about the destruction of all those spaces where human beings could feel safe and rooted in a traditional life. These negative tendencies could be tamed and made humanly bearable through urban planning based on a careful separation of spatial ‘scales’.49 The latter were defined by their most appropriate mode of transportation: houses were to be grouped into small clusters around shared community facilities such as water taps, shops and primary schools which even the feeble-bodied such as the elderly and small children could reach on foot—a ‘human scale’; several such neighbourhoods could then be grouped around civic centres providing a higher order of amenities such as bazaars, tea-houses, mosques and secondary schools, again to be accessible without motorized transport.50 Several such ‘sectors’ could finally connect via the major roads running around them to form townships and cities, the ‘scale of the machine’. In order to prevent the latter from choking to death on their own car traffic—as would happen in consequence of concentric expansion seen in most ‘natural’ cities—Doxiadis advocated a new type of city growing linearly along a predetermined axis—a ‘dynapolis’.51 Finally, in the scale of the railways and of air transportation, the correct management of international traffic in goods and people would eventually lead to the establishment of a single urban zone spanning the globe, ‘ecumenopolis’.52 Doxiadis’s main objective and concern, then, was to devise categories to effectively channel and control ‘traffic’, mapping precisely onto what Foucault referred to as the very mechanism of ‘governmentality’ in the context of urban planning—the management of ‘circulation’53 ; that gentle steering of flows of people, capital, goods, and ideas. 49 C. A. Doxiadis, ‘The Future of Our Cities’, 16 June, 1961: CADA, General Reports R-GA 211–248; Constantinos A. Doxiadis, ‘A City for Human Development’, Ekistics, vol. 25, no. 151 (1968), 50 C. A. Doxiadis, ‘Islamabad: The Creation of a New Capital’, The Town Planning Review, vol. 36, no. 1 (1965), pp. 18–24. 51 Doxiadis, Ekistics, pp. 354–380. 52 See Constantinos Apostolou Doxiades, J. G. Papaioannou, and Athenaïko Kentro Oikistikes, Ecumenopolis: The Inevitable City of the Future (New York: Norton, 1974). 53 Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, p. 64.

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The very different disciplinary power (one that ‘isolates a space, determines a segment’; or put differently, one that ‘concentrates, focuses and encloses’54 ) was, of course, still necessary in this urban arrangement, but only as a secondary consideration. Both in Korangi and Islamabad—the first and only ‘dynapolis’ to make it from the drawing board to reality—certain separations had to be enforced. For instance, zoning regulations that kept places of work away from places of residence in order to increase control over the labour force, stipulations that commercial activities were not allowed in individual houses but were to be carried out in the bazaar areas of each neighbourhood, or a certain amount of policing of encroachments of roads and green spaces. But all these instances of a disciplinary mode were ultimately meant to enhance ‘circulation’ at strategically important points. At least in conception, Islamabad and Korangi were spaces of ‘governmentality’ before and above being spaces of discipline and sovereignty.

Discipline without security Doxiadis’s Pakistani clients operated with very different notions of ‘the city’ and its relationship to state power. With regard to both Korangi and Islamabad, Doxiadis envisioned integrated communities bringing together different social categories and different economic functions. In other words, cities were conceived as spaces of interaction and circulation, and as civic entities dominated by shared community spaces.55 For the Pakistani regime, in contrast, both settlements were primarily machines of disciplinary power, spaces where problem categories could be corralled into one place, and where circulation could be prevented rather than be facilitated. The way in which slum clearance was experienced by its supposed beneficiaries combined a demonstration of arbitrary power with a façade of bureaucratic regularity. ‘Surveys’ of the number of destitute refugees were conducted at impossible speed by military officers. After the key areas of action had been identified, civil officers would appear in the slum colonies only a day or two before the actual 54

Ibid., p. 44. Letter to Joint Secretary—Ministry of Rehabilitation, Gov Pak. 3 February, 1959: CADA PakVol. 34; Revision of Greater Karachi Housing Programmes, Discussion at the Planning Commission, C-PKH 1521, 9 July, 1960: CADA PakVol. 70. 55

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movement of people was scheduled to begin. In an intricate system of checks and cross-checks amongst a hierarchy of scribes, officers and auditors, entitlement papers were drawn up and registered on numerous multicoloured proformas, before the local residents—quite deliberately without prior consultation or information—were loaded on trucks and driven to the new settlement site. Their numbers were carefully calculated and registered. The journey of the trucks was timed in advance in order to prevent the drivers from letting people off at locations other than the designated new township. Upon arrival the new housing units were to be allocated at random ostensibly in order to prevent black-marketeering or favouritism—often breaking up family units or other networks of kinship and solidarity that had grown up in response to slum life.56 At least according to the plans of those who settled them, people embedded in multiple webs of spatially mobile relationships were turned into stationary state subjects. In a move that immediately drew massive resistance,57 their social identity was to be reduced to the place of residence that the state had provided for them, to a territoriality rooted in sovereign power. Although statistics as such are normally closely associated with the much less intrusive management of ‘natural’ desires in the mode of governmentality, the relevant surveys on slum dwelling refugees in Karachi operated entirely in a disciplinary mode. The clipboard and stopwatch of the settlement officers was—to use Foucault’s own words—precisely designed to ‘allow nothing to escape’, to control even the ‘smallest infraction’ of the norm.58 The surveys stand out precisely because they identified and targeted ‘sovereign-subjects’ and not ‘population’. Ayub’s surveys operated with a fixed social category— that of the ‘refugee slum dweller’—rather than a ‘series of variables’. The subject of urban planning was thereby directly informed by the normative discourses of both muhajir entitlement and of certain expectations of ‘proper’ urban living. The slum dwelling or homeless refugee directly contradicted the very mission of Pakistan itself, that of giving a permanent home to everybody who was ideologically committed to the new state. The problem of slums in Karachi

56 Allotment Policy for shifting of Refugees (Received from KDA Resettlement Branch on 1.5.1961), attached to R-PKH 202, Social Planning in Korangi: CADA PakVol. 175. 57 ‘Proceedings of the Meeting of the Basic Democracy Members’, 10/4/1960, point 8: CADA PakVol. 69. 58 Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, pp. 45, 63.

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was thus not the ‘natural’ outcrop of rapid urbanisation awaiting ‘management’, but a moral failing to be resolved in one sweep. In consequence, these surveys at least had to aspire to capture the crisis in its entirety—rather than through probabilities, samples or case studies—listing, as far as possible, precise numbers of homeless refugees in relation to precise locations on the city map; a much invoked number of ‘537,525’ (or ‘119,402 families’) circulated through much of the material.59 Although the government was never able to fulfil its own ambitions, it aimed at a complete resettlement of all those identified. The solution was never a subtle and ‘analytical’ manipulation of ‘natural desire’. The new mass housing was constructed precisely where nobody wanted to go voluntarily. Compliance would not only have to be enforced, it would have to be enforced individually and directly. The prerogatives of territorial sovereignty were never far from the surface here. The objective behind this comprehensive disciplinary assault was, after all, the visible elimination of all irregular settlements from spaces of sovereignty in inner-city Karachi and their transfer to another equally visible space of sovereignty elsewhere. It is highly significant that amongst the first irregular slum colonies to be dismantled was Qaidabad, which existed in close proximity to one of the most important spaces of sovereignty of the new state, the mazar (mausoleum) of the State’s Founder Muhammad Ali Jinnah.60 The fact that Korangi was located several miles outside the established city, and that the transport links between centre and suburb remained neglected for many years, was precisely the point, because it made the isolation of the malignant segment more effective. As Doxiadis had predicted right from the start, the project ‘failed’ because the government made no efforts to facilitate—to manage— the voluntary settlement of middle-class families in the area, as this would have involved financial stimuli and, of course, the provision of a functioning infrastructure. The case of Islamabad is immediately relevant because it acted as the necessary counterpart to Korangi. Here, it was ‘civil servants’ who had to be contained and disciplined in a remote location far away from the centres of urbanity. A secret cabinet White Paper on ‘Islamabad’ stated openly what every informed 59 For example Dox PA 17 ‘Development of the Korangi Area’ in CADA: PakVol. 14. Based on Lt. Col. Nazir Ahmed, Survey of Shelterless Persons in Karachi, Government of Pakistan, 1958. 60 Ansari, Life after Partition, p. 190.

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citizen of Karachi knew at the time, that the Ayub regime did not want to encourage interaction between intellectuals, business leaders, politicians and bureaucrats because this could only lead to ‘corruption’. Doxiadis was left to pencil an emphatic ‘no’ into his own private copy of the document but then proceeded with the project according to his patron’s wishes.61 The actual settlement in Islamabad, a widespread urban myth in Pakistan goes, was as involuntary as that in Korangi—with Ayub ‘punishing’ bothersome individuals with the poisoned chalice of a free housing plot in the middle of nowhere.

Sovereignty in concrete For all its potential for more nuanced forms of social control, the Korangi project was first and foremost an enactment of sovereign power. Although the Karachi housing crisis had been longstanding and was widely covered in the Pakistani media, there had been no public discussion—or indeed as far as one can tell from the accessible records, even official deliberation—about the merits of the Korangi project itself. General Ayub Khan, in his capacity as Chief Martial Law Administrator, had simply delegated the power to resolve the refugee problem in any way he deemed fit to his second in command, General Azam Khan, who acted as Minister for Refugee Rehabilitation. A man with a known ‘go-getter’ attitude and some private interest in architecture and urban planning, Azam is reputed to have chosen the foreign consultancy company that was to plan and execute the Korangi project on the spot, simply because he was charmed when meeting C. A. Doxiadis for the first time. According to witnesses, the General was not even interested in discussing basic problems or resource constraints, and simply gave the order to proceed and left all else to the consultant.62

61 Government of Pakistan, unpublished secret ‘Report on the Location of the Federal Capital of Pakistan’, p. 31, CADA. Doxiadis Associates later performed remarkable feats in statistical manipulation proving that Islamabad would not be a civil servant ghetto, despite the fact that most of the projected population was already accounted for by bureaucrats. ‘The Federal Capital of Pakistan: Periodical report No. 5, Estimating the cost’: CADA PakVol. 16, p. 197. 62 ‘Pakistan Housing’ TOICA 901, 24 December, 1958, USNA, RG469. Records of the Foreign Assistance Agencies, Deputy Director’s Office, Near East Central Files, Pakistan Subject Files, 1952–1958, Box 9.

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The military regime conceived and portrayed state power as something that rested fundamentally on decisiveness and will. Carl Schmitt’s argument that the worst danger for the sovereign is not a wrong decision, but the inability to make any decision at all,63 applies equally well to the military commander who now happened to occupy the role of sovereign himself. Questions of technicalities and outcomes were secondary, and questions about legitimacy entirely excluded. The act of decision produced its own legitimacy. What was emphasized in the official coverage of the Korangi project above all else was speed: contract to foundation stone, to completion of the first units—all accomplished within six months. Sovereign power relies on a form of temporality that is different from that of both disciplinary power and ‘security’. As Schmitt’s critics have often pointed out when noticing the lack of positive content in his definition of the political, the act of decision does not have duration64 ; it is a punctuation mark inserted into the flow of time. Unlike a disciplinary regime that seeks to control behaviour minutely and continuously sovereign power is only present at the very moment of enactment—for instance, when a project is started or terminated in demonstrations of willpower, or in certain carefully choreographed moments of appropriation and bestowment. There is a basic incompatibility between a state conceived solely on the power to decide, and a long-term and ‘everyday’ project that over the course of its lifespan can only tie down and therefore limit future acts of decision. Really, ‘sovereign’ is only he who can destroy with the same absolute ease as he can build. The valorization of sovereign power over other sources of power may not only have directly contributed to the ‘failure’ of Korangi, it may—paradoxically—have turned failure into something like a desired outcome. Korangi was, first and foremost, an occasion when the Pakistani state could stamp its power of decision in an emblematic form onto virgin land. The place where the new township was built was largely empty wasteland—a ‘terrible desert’ (‘khaufnak registan’) according to

63 Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George D. Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), pp. 38–50. 64 Victoria Kahn, ‘Hamlet or Hecuba: Carl Schmitt’s Decision’, Representations, vol. 83, no. Summer (2003). More specifically Horst Bredekamp et al.. ‘From Walter Benjamin to Carl Schmitt, via Thomas Hobbes’, Critical Inquiry (1999) vol. 25 (2) pp. 251–254.

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one early inhabitant unconnected to the project65 —with existing settlements such as the madrasa Dar ul-Ulum of Maulana Mufti Muhammad Shafi and a few fishing facilities posing no serious obstacles to its appropriation.66 Once Korangi was built it was presented directly as the sovereign’s territory on official occasions. General Ayub Khan and his most important ministers—as well as virtually every high-ranking foreign dignitary visiting Karachi—would travel by car on carefully demarcated routes across the new township, thus directly producing and consuming the space of the township itself. Their widely publicized visits usually ended with a climb onto the roof of the health centre in the ‘demonstration sector’ where building work was most advanced, and from where even the half-complete housing units in the distance combined with more finished rows of streets provided a powerful vista of territory-made-subject.67 Perhaps the most striking sovereign power of this kind was staged for Eisenhower’s visit in late 1959. In addition to travelling through Karachi by official motorcade, the most powerful man in the world shared a helicopter with General Ayub to contemplate Korangi from the air. It was, of course, from a bird’s eye perspective, when the built-up area of Korangi could be seen in stark contrast with the semidesert surrounding it, that it really became an emblem of sovereignty. The people of Korangi were configured in ways that made them an integral part of this spatial and visual aesthetics; the following quote from Dawn described a particularly striking example: ‘From their areal [sic] vantage point the two Presidents had a fine view of school students in the compound forming themselves into an “I like Ike” arrangement. Another batch of school boys had formed themselves into a crescent and a star’.68 Although pushed to secondary importance by the spatial presence of mass architecture, sovereignty over people was never entirely excluded from such moments. It was either carefully staged—when Ayub handed over the keys to the first house to Haji Azmatullah, an

65 Maulana Muhammad Rafi Usmani, Kuch Yadein, Kuch Batein, Audio Recording, downloaded from www.aswatalislam.net [accessed 1 October, 2010]. 66 See map of existing built-up areas in Dox-PA 17 2/6/1959, p. 417. For dealing with existing settlements see Dox PA 5. 15.4.59, ‘The Korangi Development within the greater Karachi Area—Periodical Report No. 2’: CADA PakVol. 14. 67 C-PKH 2292, 7 January, 1961 CADA: PakVol. 107; Dawn, 10 April, 1959, p. 14; The Times, 4 November, 1960. 68 Dawn, 8 December, 1959.

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artisan from Agra, for instance69 —or offered entry points to subtle subversion, for example, when, true to style, Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, broke loose from the official Queen’s delegation and cornered one of the local shopkeepers into a ‘conversation’.70 A more significant contradiction existed between the strongly territorialized message of ‘bestriding’ Korangi and the much more people-centred discourse disseminated in the official souvenir brochures that were handed out on the same occasion. The impact of architecture and space is clearly acknowledged here, but it is framed with pictures of happy and smiling inhabitants who are also consistently moved centre-stage in the text.71 As outlined earlier, the foreign consultant who produced this material clearly saw the power which operated in Korangi in ways different from the local regime.

Towards a post-colonial governmentality The Korangi case study suggests that the Pakistani state under General Ayub had an overriding interest in the enactment of sovereign power and its continued territorialization, some concern for the possibilities of disciplinary power, but little appreciation of the calculated lightness of touch of ‘governmentality’. Just as the military regime believed (at least in public) that economic problems could be resolved by identifying categories of economic miscreants, so they also assumed that urban overcrowding was a one-off problem caused by the dislocation of Partition and fuelled by the immoral practices of land speculators and corrupt government officials. Government required above all else a decisive and ‘no-nonsense’ attitude that deliberately violated the course of ‘natural’ economic and social processes. But such disciplinary interventionism also had clear limits. Pakistan, under Ayub, never turned into a ‘police state’ in Foucault’s sense72 of a highly interventionist agency out to regulate most aspects of life for the benefit of its subjects. The kind of disciplinary power that 69

C-PKH 4456, 27 April, 1962: CADA, Vol. Dox-Pakistan, p. 154. Dawn, 2 February, 1961. 71 Government of Pakistan—Ministry of Rehabilitation, National Housing and Settlements Agency, The Korangi Township in Karachi: special issue on the occasion of the visit to Pakistan of the President of the United States of America Dwight D. Eisenhower, CADA: ArchiveFile Dox 25310. 72 Not to be confused with commonsense notions of a ‘police state’, Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, pp. 313–328. 70

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was brought to bear on the unfortunate slum dwellers of Qaidabad as they were trucked out to thousands of neatly arranged concrete shells, was of course all too ‘real’; a problem category had indeed been removed from the realm of the ‘normal’ and been concentrated in a new confined location. But in the end this kind of disciplinary project was significant for a different reason—because it gave substance to a ‘dream’ of power.73 Disciplinary power functioned as the halo of sovereign power. The clearance of inner city slums in Karachi and the settlement of refugees were of some importance for some time, but they did not command sustained commitment. Surprisingly little disciplinary power was brought to bear on the residents of Korangi after their forcible transportation. Many filtered back into the city, and, with regard to those who stayed, planning provisions were only enforced in a lacklustre fashion. Most importantly, the military regime never used the sovereign power at its disposal to enforce the payment of subscriptions amongst Korangi residents. When fewer and fewer of them made lease payments during the early 1960s, a hapless Karachi Development Authority attempted to play it tough by threatening eviction. The local response was angry and sustained, culminating in an all-out rent strike in 1963.74 In the end, the regime preferred to cut loose from the project rather than intervene. Similarly, local residents were highly successful in altering Doxiadis’s Master Plan in several important ways through a politics of ‘everyday’ resistance. In order to escape the need to pay rents to the municipality, for instance, they never moved into the bazaar areas and commercial spaces designated for them, and preferred to run shops and small enterprises from their homes.75 To the great chagrin of the resident consultants, the sole Pakistani government official in charge of the project routinely capitulated to local demands because he wanted to avoid opposition. This was particularly noticeable when such demands were phrased in a religious language, for instance, in the widespread practice of colonizing empty spaces with illegally constructed mosques.76

73

‘The panopticon is really the oldest dream of the oldest sovereign’, Ibid., p. 66. Dawn, 12 February, 1961; Communication and Works Department, ‘Minutes meeting with Abdul Aziz’, 25 August, 1963, C-PKH 6109: CADA, PakVol. 188. 75 Ihsan Ullah, ‘A study of a neighbourhood market in Korangi’, August 1961: CADA. 76 For example, Letter Mashooq Ali, President, Kurrissian [Qureshian] Mosque to Overseer in Charge Market 36/D, 6 April, 1962, R-PA 150, 12 April, 1962, Building 74

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It was due to similar local initiative without state backing that at least some parts of Korangi eventually came to flourish: contemporary aerial pictures show Doxiadis’s overall layout largely realized, although few of the neighbourhoods and community facilities he built have survived. In some of his designated sectors erstwhile markets and schools are abandoned and partly overgrown with vegetation. But elsewhere—for instance, in the old ‘demonstration sector’ so admired by foreign visitors back in 1960—the original buildings have been entirely colonized by a multitude of much smaller structures. The overall impression is one of thriving lower middle-class shopping areas with surprisingly well-maintained roads and a good amount of vehicular traffic.77 The successful management of ‘circulation’ was achieved within the framework of a ‘governmentality’ of absence, it appears, that left everything to non-state agency. However, let us not lose sight of Dr Doxiadis and his elaborate plans for ‘security’ power in new townships like Korangi. He deserves the space he was given in this discussion of Pakistani ‘governmentality’ for good reason. After all, he was—despite his many disagreements with and his final abandonment by Ayub’s regime— himself a part of the Pakistani state. The local DA office had as much influence over the actual building work in Korangi as the understaffed ‘official’ state organs involved, and on many occasions decisions on local requests were sought from them directly.78 Doxiadis was not alone in this. Many foreign experts and development organisations similarly had become part of the ‘local’ state: from the Harvard Advisory Group drafting economic policy to the US engineers building the Karnaphuli Multipurpose Barrage in East Pakistan. It is unlikely that Korangi would ever have come into existence if international connections had not played such an important role in the constitution of the Pakistani state. The highly uneven relationship between sovereign, disciplinary and ‘security’ power in the politics of the project was never a case of ‘local’ against ‘international’, however. Doxiadis, the foreign expert, may have personified the unrealized potentialities of ‘governmentality’, but in every other respect, the

Regulations for Korangi (draft): CADA PakVol. 154; Letter ‘Residents of 2-A Area’, 10 November, 1961, CADA: PakVol. 110. 77 Google Earth [accessed 10 October, 2008]. 78 For example, Letter Mashooq Ali Siddiq, Aziz Ahmad Bukhari, C-PKH 6271, 30 October, 1963: CADA PakVol. 188; Letter S. Y. Karmani, Chairman Baldia Residence Deputation, 22 November, 1960: CADA PakVol. 108.

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international connection actually amplified the sovereignty focus of the post-colonial Pakistani state. Discounting the kind of vested interests that ‘development’ inevitably produced among metropolitan manufacturers, technocrats and international salesmen, there is no reason to assume too close a relationship between the interests of global capital and the sponsorship of ‘governmentality’. Pakistan occupied a position of some importance in the global economy by virtue of its near monopoly over the production and primary manufacture of jute (and to a lesser extent its emerging cotton industry in West Pakistan), and this undoubtedly did have some impact on the character of the state.79 But, crucially, it did not necessitate the deep involvement of the state in the organization of the relations of production which, at least on paper, the Korangi project with its workers’ housing and industrial zone represented. This is not to say that the Ayub regime did not play any role in economic management; it certainly did in its provision of state-backed loans and incentives and in the patronage of a new class of state-dependent industrialists; but it did not tactically deploy ‘security’ power to create a large, disciplined and spatially fixed formal labour force. On the contrary, the fact that the new mass housing was built in Karachi and not in the jute-producing East— as well as that the settlement of labour was deliberately out of sync with the development of industry—largely discredits the argument that a project like Korangi was some sort of ‘software’ to open up Pakistan to the kind of global capitalism as then existed under cold war conditions.80 It was perhaps Pakistan’s more imaginary than real strategic importance for a ‘southern arch’ of anti-communist Muslim states that made it important to US foreign policy, and it was US financial and political assistance that allowed the Pakistani military to gain a predominant position in Pakistani society. What mattered was not that Pakistan would turn into a fully functioning welfare state of the kind suggested by the Korangi project, but that Pakistan would channel its meagre resources into an armed agency ready to defend US interests 79 It is indicative, for instance, that Hamza Alavi’s celebrated Poulantzian theoretization of the Pakistani state pays much attention to the interests of the ‘metropolitan neo-colonialist bourgeoisie’, Hamza Alavi, ‘The State in Post-Colonial Societies—Pakistan and Bangladesh’, New Left Review, vol. 74, no. July August (1972). 80 As argued with regard to India’s recent capitalist development in Partha Chatterjee, ‘Democracy and Economic Transformation in India’, Economic and Political Weekly, 18 April, 2008.

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in the wider region. US official thinking made no secret of this and by the late 1950s, the attitude towards development aid per se was one of healthy scepticism, and whatever aid was given—including substantial financial assistance—was directly justified with reference to Pakistan’s strategic role.81 In short, the US administration wanted precisely the kind of martial state obsessed with sovereign power as had actually come into existence under General Ayub Khan. A more integrated edifice based on a self-disciplined ‘society’, enlightened management and consensual people’s sovereignty could never have been monopolized as a global praetorian service provider. In final analysis, the Korangi project reveals a fundamental paradox: the Pakistani state has gained and defended its existence and character through the enactment of its own failure. In theory, Korangi served as a representation of the kind of successful ‘triangulation’ of the three powers—to use Foucault once more—which had turned the welfare states of Western Europe into oases of consensual politics and stability. The new township helped to territorialize state sovereignty, endowed the latter with a disciplinary halo and, if Doxiadis’ visions had been duly realized, had at least the potential to become a space of security/governmentality. In practice, Korangi had to be abandoned because the martial state could not tolerate becoming a victim of its own success. Sovereign power had to destroy what it had created just to be sure that its own creature had not acquired a power of its own. It is after all only in a context of ‘raw’ sovereignty and ‘weak’ governmentality that a regime like Ayub’s could justify the continuing maintenance of a state of ‘exception’. The Korangi township thus encapsulated the dual use of ‘development’ for postcolonial sovereignty—it demonstrated what an act of executive willpower could achieve, and through its very failure as a governmentality project, also that executive willpower would never become superfluous.

81 Expressed directly in ‘Secret Memo MAAG Submission’, ICA, 5 October, 1958 (Killen), Box 4 ‘Pakistan—Defense—Expenditure’; also in ‘Secret Memorandum’, Brodie (State Department) to J. H. Canning (ICA) 5/12/1955, Box 12, ‘Pakistan programs 1955–1956’. ‘1958 MDA programs Military Advisory Group to Pakistan (secret)’, 23 July, 1957, Appendix A; ‘Memo US Embassy Karachi to Department of State’, 16 December, 1958, Box 13, ‘Pakistan Programs (MDA) 1956–1958’; Secret telegram Karachi to State 27 August, 1954, Box 14, ‘Heinz Mission Report (draft) 1954–1955’: USNA, RG469 Pakistan Subject Files, 1952–1958.

C Cambridge University Press 2010 Modern Asian Studies 45, 1 (2011) pp. 159–178.  doi:10.1017/S0026749X10000296 First published online 6 December 2010

Everyday expectations of the state during Pakistan’s early years: Letters to the Editor, Dawn (Karachi), 1950–1953 SARAH ANSARI Department of History, Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham, Surrey TW20 0EX. UK Email: [email protected]

Abstract Accessing the day-to-day, albeit pressing, concerns of Pakistanis in the early 1950s can be difficult as a result of the relative paucity of relevant primary material. One set of sources, however, are the letters written to the editors of contemporary newspapers during this period, in which correspondents outlined their expectations of, made demands on, and aired their frustrations with, the everyday state in the years following independence and Pakistan’s creation. This paper draws on a sample of this correspondence on the letter pages of Dawn (Karachi) during 1950–1953 in order to explore the views of ordinary citizens as they grappled with problems of housing, transport, food rationing, water shortage, and corruption.

Introduction The ‘everyday state’, from the point of view of existing literature relating to Pakistan, remains very much taken-for-granted, and hence an overlooked aspect of people’s lives there. The concept, which has come to be increasingly deployed by anthropologists, geographers, historians and political scientists in relation to other parts of the world, as yet remains largely unexplored from a Pakistani point of view.1 Focussing on the state has usually involved explaining why 1 For an innovative exploration of the state at its everyday level in Pakistan, see the forthcoming study by political scientist Matthew Nelson that pinpoints intersections between land, law and the logic of local (quotidian) politics in the context of the Punjab since independence. Examples of existing literature that engage (albeit in different ways) with the concept of the ‘everyday state’ in relation to India include: Akhil

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Pakistan came into existence in the first place—how the new state was created—and then why authoritarian trends rather than democratic political processes came to be so closely associated with it over subsequent years—why, in effect, particular interests captured control of the state apparatus.2 There has been relatively little concern with what the state in Pakistan at the ordinary everyday level has meant to its citizens.

The Challenge Pakistan, like its neighbour India, faced huge challenges in making the transition from colonial rule to independence in the years following 1947. But unlike India, where the responsibilities of the post-colonial state vis-à-vis those of the people were articulated fairly swiftly and at substantial length in its 1950 constitution, it took far longer to work out the same basic political coordinates for Pakistan. It was not until 1956 that Pakistan’s first constitution appeared, and even then Gupta, ‘Blurred Boundaries: the Discourse of Corruption, the Culture of Politics, and the Imagined State’, American Ethnologist, Vol. 22, No. 2 (May 1995), pp. 375–402; C. J. Fuller and Véronique Bénéï (eds), The Everyday State and Society in Modern India (London: C. Hurst and Co., 2001); Craig Jeffrey, ‘Caste, Class and Clientelism: A Political Economy of Everyday Corruption in Rural North India’, Economic Geography, Vol. 78, No. 1 (January 2002), pp. 21–41; and René Véron, Stuart Corbridge, Glyn Williams and Manoj Srivastava, ‘The Everyday State and Political Society in Eastern India: Structuring Access to the Employment Assurance Scheme’, The Journal of Development Studies, Vol. 39, No, 5 (June 2003), pp. 1–28. Moving away from South Asia, Sheldon Garon’s Molding Japanese Minds: The State in Everyday Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), for instance, taps into the intimate everyday relationships between Japanese people and their government over the course of the twentieth century, while Salwa Ismail’s Political Life in Cairo’s New Quarters: Encountering the Everyday State (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006) highlights the interplay of structural changes, state power, and daily governance in the context of contemporary Egypt. 2 Classic overviews of the first of these two developments include Khalid Bin Sayeed, Pakistan: the Formative Phase (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), and Ayesha Jalal, The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim League and the Demand for Pakistan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). As far as the second development is concerned, for the early decades of Pakistan’s political evolution, see Keith B. Callard, Pakistan: a Political Study (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1957); Mushtaq Ahmed, Government and Politics in Pakistan (New York: Praeger, second and revised edition, 1963); Ayesha Jalal, The State of Martial Rule: The Origins of Pakistan’s Political Economy of Defence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); and the relevant chapters in M. Rafique Afzal, Pakistan: History and Politics, 1947–1971 (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2001); and Ian Talbot, Pakistan: A Modern History (London: C. Hurst and Co., 2005).

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it barely survived two years before the ‘rules of engagement’ were redrawn by the military. As a result, during the late 1940s and 1950s, the Pakistani state lacked much of the authority associated (rightly or wrongly) with its Nehruvian counterpart, a situation not helped by the fact that its newly-created citizens were still coming to terms with the impact on their identity that independence combined with partition had produced.3 Under these circumstances, it is perhaps not surprising that little is known about what the state meant to people, and it might well be assumed that it represented something that was remote in terms of their immediate lives. Yet, as work on the relationship between society and the state in India has emphasized, such assumptions underestimate the extent to which social forces penetrated the state-system and so blurred the boundaries between them in practice.4 Indeed, it could be argued that getting away from approaching the immediate past in a ‘top down’ fashion—using localized practices to throw light on the workings of a translocal institution5 —necessitates the use of different kinds of methodologies that link more closely to other social science disciplines than those ‘traditionally’ deployed by historians. As Fuller and Harriss have suggested in relation to India, for instance, the ethnographic methods associated with anthropology can serve historians well, particularly when the time frames under consideration involve relatively recent developments.6 Accessing the routine, albeit pressing, concerns of Pakistanis during their state’s early years, however, poses difficulties thanks to the paucity of accessible primary material. One set of historical sources that are available to those interested in finding out more about the daily interactions between state and society during this period are the letters written to contemporary newspapers. In them members of the general public outlined their expectations of, made demands on, and frequently aired their frustrations with the state, its actions

3 See Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar, The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia: Refugees, Boundaries, Histories (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007) Chapter 5, ‘Passports and Boundaries’, and Chapter 6, ‘The Phantasm of Passports’, for a detailed exploration how the requirement for travel permits and then passports, in order to visit India, made an impact on the lives of ordinary Pakistanis during this period. 4 D. J. Fuller and John Harriss, ‘For an Anthropology of the Modern Indian State’, in Fuller and Bénéï, The Everyday State, p. 10. 5 Gupta, ‘Blurred Boundaries’, p. 356. 6 Fuller and Harriss, ‘For an anthropology’, p. 2.

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and those who represented it in the years following independence. As Gupta has argued, newspapers are ‘cultural texts that give us important clues to the political culture of the period’.7 According to a more contemporary analysis of the content of Pakistani newspapers, ‘Letters to the Editor’ constitute precisely the ‘opinion page of the ordinary reader. . .with views ranging] from grandiose thoughts about the destiny of the country to complaints about the everyday problems of the ordinary people’.8 Through them, we can access ordinary voices from the past. While any selection of letters that is actually chosen for inclusion by a newspaper cannot be regarded as ‘random’, since any such publications possess agendas of their own to which correspondents’ letters may contribute, revealing insights can still be drawn from the airings of the views of ordinary citizens into their contemporary priorities and concerns, even when possible distortions are taken into account. Accordingly, this paper draws on a sample of this correspondence on the letter pages of Dawn (a national Englishlanguage newspaper published in Karachi) during the early 1950s in order to explore the views of these ordinary citizens (from the perspective of Karachi and, to a lesser degree, the province of Sindh) as they grappled with problems of housing, transport, food rationing, water shortages, and what they often termed ‘graft’, that is corruption, usually involving government officials and members of the general public. Before turning to what these letters reveal in terms of ‘the discursive construction of the state in public culture’,9 however, it is necessary to emphasize that, in the early 1950s, Pakistan remained very much a nation-in-the-making. As mentioned above, the physical contours of the state may have been established but the Constituent Assembly (the acting National Assembly), and its various sub-committees, were still debating the basic contents of the constitution that had yet to be finalised.10 In addition, millions of refugees had still not been properly

7

Gupta, ‘Blurred Boundaries’, p. 386. Nadeem ul Haque and Arif Sheikh, ‘Concerns of Intelligentsia in Pakistan: Content Analysis of Newspapers’, Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 29, No. 24 (June 11, 1994), p. 1485. 9 Gupta, ‘Blurred Boundaries’, p. 387. 10 For contemporary assessments of the problems involved in drawing up Pakistan’s first (1956) constitution, see Ardath W. Burks, ‘Constitution-Making in Pakistan’, Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 69, No. 4 (December 1954), pp. 541–564; and G. W. Choudhury, ‘The Constitution of Pakistan’, Pacific Affairs, Vol. 29, No. 3 (September 1956), pp. 243–252. 8

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‘rehabilitated’. Nor had the country’s economy recovered from the disruptions triggered by partition. Not all parts of Pakistan, however, were affected to the same degree. Compared with the Punjab, the province of Sindh, along with what had become the new Federal Capital of Karachi (in 1948), continued to be more acutely affected by periodic influxes of large numbers of migrants from India as well as from other parts of Pakistan. Sindh’s provincial ministry, which had been based in Karachi, had relocated inland, at least in part, to the city of Hyderabad with all the various administrative upheavals that this involved, while the federal Pakistani authorities now shared, and vied for, space in the capital with its local municipal corporation. Karachi was itself massively swollen in terms of population, and did not possess sufficient buildings to accommodate fully either the new bureaucracy or the migrants themselves. The result was that space was commandeered for official purposes, large numbers of people in effect squatted in property that had been ‘evacuated’ by departing non-Muslims, and many others were still living in temporary shelters in vacant public spaces, parks and on footpaths of the city. Similar processes were at work elsewhere in urban Sindh, to a lesser degree, with the situation in places such as Hyderabad and Sukkur mirroring that of Karachi in many ways.11 Local resources, therefore, remained severely stretched. Not surprisingly, this state of affairs produced persistent disquiet in relation to how well, or (alternatively) how badly, the new administrative apparatus (whether at federal, provincial, district or municipal level) and its officials (highly placed or lower level) were addressing the needs of its citizenship. In the absence of a political framework that might have allowed ordinary Pakistanis on a regular basis to air their grievances, or to sanction those who ruled them, there was tangible frustration that the authorities repeatedly sought to defuse through appeals to peoples’ patriotic sentiment and promises of future improvements, if the nation (rather than the state) as a whole ‘pulled together’. It is against this backdrop that the concerns of the people who wrote letters to Dawn need to be placed. Dawn, as an English-language newspaper that projected itself as a ‘national’ publication while closely identifying with the ‘refugee cause’, could not really claim to represent the views of a representative cross-section of the people who were 11 See Sarah Ansari, Life After Partition: Migration, Community and Strife in Sindh, 1947–1962 (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2005).

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now living in what had become Pakistan. Its readership, simply by virtue of being able to read its content, hardly comprised ‘ordinary’ Pakistanis, and so it could be argued that Dawn projected the voices of a ‘nationalist’ elite, which, while not necessarily defined along straightforward class lines, belonged in the main to people with relatively ‘privileged’ backgrounds (whether in terms of access to an English-style education or to particular kinds of employment).12 Yet, to a great extent, despite these inherent biases, its editors regarded themselves as ‘defenders of the nation’ as a whole, as they interpreted the intentions of Muhammad Ali Jinnah (who had established the newspaper in Delhi prior to partition). Dawn’s editorial line could, therefore, as easily criticize as support the government of the day, depending on the latter’s stance on a particular matter. This often turned out to be the case when it came to matters affecting refugees, thus suggesting a tension between the newspaper’s stated aims and its actual day-to-day concerns. While generally supportive of the new establishment (whether in the shape of the federal authorities or their provincial counterparts), Dawn operated as a proverbial thorn in its side when circumstances, from its editor’s point of view, so dictated or warranted. Looking at Dawn’s letters over a discrete period—five or so years after the creation of Pakistan—reveals unmistakeable patterns in relation to the main issues of concern articulated by their writers. The most enduring topic of complaint centred on accommodation— there was persistent dissatisfaction with the ways in which the local authorities were handling the issue of rehabilitating, that is rehousing, those who had migrated from what was now India whether in 1947 itself or later on. There were, not surprisingly perhaps, variations on this theme: sometimes the authorities were not doing enough, sometimes they were doing too much, and correspondents frequently closed their letters with requests for persons more highly placed within the bureaucracy to intervene and sort out whatever particular mess had been identified. As in the parts of India affected by the upheavals of partition, there was considerable competition and uncertainty connected with evacuee property, that is, property 12 Dawn’s self-projection as a ‘national’ newspaper, contrasted with that of Jang, another newspaper popular among Urdu-speaking migrants in Karachi that, during the 1950s, was more-or-less entirely a representative of muhajir interests. It should be noted, however, that there was a Gujarati edition of the newspaper, serving the needs of the city’s long-established, but now expanded significantly in size thanks to migration from India, Gujarati-speaking inhabitants.

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associated with people who had migrated and whose status had become ambiguous. To those who lost out in what was a fierce competition for allotments (and not surprisingly, they tended to be those who wrote to the newspaper), the decisions of rehabilitation department officials regarding how evacuee property was allocated could appear arbitrary at best, and corrupt at worst. There was little apparent confidence in the ability, or readiness, of lower level state employees to deal with these matters satisfactorily, or even fairly. One correspondent, whose letter of December 1951 highlighted some of the issues concerned, complained in the following manner about the degree to which corrupt practices had become commonplace in Karachi: I would like to bring to the notice of the authorities concerned a glaring instance in which deserving refugees are being uprooted and sacrificed at the altar of favouritism and the high handedness of resourceful people. Such cases are not very uncommon and are eating [away at] the social life like canker and are as a matter of fact defeating the very purpose of refugee rehabilitation. The support which such people receive makes them bold enough to defy the law, the principles of equity, justice and fair play are of course the last to be counted.13

This anonymous letter-writer then went on to outline in some detail irregularities involved in the allotting of a plot of land that, he claimed, had been reassigned to a wealthy recent arrival from Meerut (in UP) with ‘good connections’ in the Public Works Department. The fact that large numbers of migrants continued to arrive in Karachi throughout the early 1950s meant that the practical problems and challenges associated with their rehabilitation dragged on throughout this decade, and constituted a great deal of the criticism that was launched by frustrated citizens in the direction of the state, whether at its central representatives in federally-administered Karachi or at local provincial or municipal officials.14 Personal connections at the disposal of those with the necessary social capital15 were usually credited with making a noticeable difference to individual experiences of resettlement and rehabilitation. At the same time, the state’s handling of evacuee property was closely scrutinised. As Zamindar 13

A Refugee, Karachi, ‘Refugee Rehabilitation’, Dawn, 9 December, 1951, p. 7. Ansari, Life after Partition, pp. 127–132. 15 The concept of ‘social capital’ describes the pattern and intensity of networks among people and the shared values which arise from those networks. Definitions of social capital vary, but the main aspects include citizenship, ‘neighbourliness’, social networks and civic participation. See John Field, Social Capital (London: Routledge, 2003) for a useful introduction to this concept. 14

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has shown, in relation to Karachi during this period, refugee interest groups were quick to exploit any suspicion that the authorities might be turning a blind eye to possible abuses, and used the courts to highlight where and how they alleged that the system was manipulated in favour of those with connections in the right places.16 The evident failure of the authorities to improve the living conditions of many of the refugees in Karachi likewise drew persistent criticism. By the early 1950s, there was clearly a widespread expectation that the so-called refugee colonies that had emerged in the province’s urban centres in the late 1940s—often starting life as haphazard groupings of small ramshackle huts with virtually non-existent water and sewerage arrangements—would have been significantly upgraded in terms of facilities as well as regularised insofar as their official status was concerned. But, as the following (anonymous) letter dated January 1952 indicated, when the authorities did eventually get round to acting, it was commonly believed that their intervention threatened to undo much of the progress that the refugees had themselves made, leading to high degrees of frustration on the part of the latter.17 In this particular case, the complaint centred on a lengthy dispute over the official status of a particular housing society in Karachi: I would like to bring to the attention of the Central Government and Rehabilitation Department regarding their belated action in issuing ejectment [sic] notices to residents of the full-fledged and well-established Khudadad Colony. I do not understand what these officials were doing when this colony—in 1948—began to form its root [sic] on this vacant land which has now been allotted to another housing society. Of course the refugees who are occupying this land and settled down here did so with the permission of the then District Magistrate. Now after a lapse of over three years, when the Colony has become a first rate Colony of Karachi, having well-built pucca houses numbering nearly 700, accommodating over 10,000 individuals of moderate means, the Government wants to demolish the houses and dislodge the residents. In case the ill-advised and totally unjustified action of demolishing the houses is carried out, it will be the most unfortunate incident without any precedent.18

Not all contemporary observers, however, believed that the blame lay entirely with the authorities. A 1953 American embassy report 16

Zamindar, The Long Partition, Chapter 4, ‘Economies of Displacement’. For further discussion of the functioning of housing societies in Karachi in the late 1940s and early 1950s and their relationship with the authorities, see Ansari, Life after Partition, pp. 132–144. 18 A Resident, Karachi, ‘Khudadad Colony’, Dawn, 6 January, 1952, p. 5. 17

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on Karachi’s major colonies attributed at least some of the problems encountered by refugees to their own outlook, noting a degree of apathy amongst them, which, according to its author, had origins that lay in the ‘resigned acceptance of government indifference’ of prePartition days. At the same time, the report dismissed the efforts of the Ministry of Refugees and Rehabilitation as ‘puny’, and noted the irony of the apparent refusal of rehabilitation officials to ‘pamper’ the refugees given the fact that in Karachi and other provincial urban centres many of the same officials had received priority treatment in terms of housing following their own arrival from India.19 The second set of grievances that dominated the letter columns of Dawn during this period revolved around the quality of the public services provided by those responsible for the various municipalities of the province as well as that of Karachi. These ranged from the question of public transport (not a petty issue in a city growing as fast as Karachi was, with a workforce that increasingly lived far from places of employment now that large numbers of refugees were being ‘cleared’ from the city centre to live in what were then its outer fringes) to those of sanitary issues and access to all-important but all-too-rare open public spaces. The following letter thus provides insights into the way in which the authorities handled the business of expanding transport facilities, albeit through the somewhat jaundiced eye of someone who definitely regarded themselves as having suffered in the process: Strange are the ways of the Provincial Transport Authority [PTA] in granting permits for plying buses in the Federal Capital. I along with hundred others had applied for one such permit in March ’51. For ten months nothing was known about the fate of our applications in spite of our visiting the PTA office every week for enquiries. Suddenly on 10 Dec a note from the Secretary of the PTA was received with instructions to produce a completely ready carriage for inspection on Dec 14 (morning). This note bore the date of Dec 5, and on enquiries it was found out that most of the applicants had received the same note. May I enquire from the Secretary who on earth could produce a readymade carriage within four days. This note amounted to me to be nothing more than a rejection of my application. It would have been better if our Secretary had written saying that our application had been rejected. But the worst part of it was when on Dec 14 (morning) some of the people, very few in numbers, turned up with ready-made buses. Nobody could believe that these 19 ‘Economic and Financial Review, Pakistan, August 1953’, Despatch 196, 24 September, 1953, 890D.00/9–2453, United States National Archives. As Ian Talbot’s contribution to this special issue—exploring the discourses, denials and dissonances of refugee rehabilitation in East and West Punjab—argues, the state often had a very different story to tell to that produced by refugees themselves.

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were made within four days. These privileged persons perhaps were given this information that they should keep their carriages ready much before the notices were issued. This is indeed the way rehabilitation is going to be made with the help of the people.20

Likewise, the local authorities, in the shape of the Karachi Municipality, came in for their fair share of criticism for the way that the Municipality made its decisions. Take, for instance, the question of the city’s bus routes: While allotting the routes to new buses, the transport committee has changed its outlook. Their motto or criterion is greatest good to the smallest number or greatest loss to the greatest number. To implement this they have allotted best routes to worst buses and worst routes to best buses. . .they have not cared for the good of the public which is the real contributor of buses. Our interests and outlook has been ignored.21

And it was not just who it was who acquired the permits to run bus services that rankled with readers of Dawn. As another letter, dated April 1952, highlighted, there was considerable public disquiet over the patently inadequate provision of bus services: Sufficient time has elapsed since the Sind government took over the transport system of certain routes in Karachi and Sind. With the control going into government hands, hopes ran high that many modern conveniences of road transport will now be comfortable. Suffice it to say that far [from] being cheap no facilities whatsoever have been afforded to [the] public travelling by the government buses. . .I request the Sind government authorities to see that their transport system is run on the best possible lines. Fare and baggage charges should be reasonable, waiting rooms provided and only tip-top buses to be run.22

Sanitary matters in over-crowded communities proved to be an especially sensitive topic. As one correspondent writing to the newspaper from Upper Sindh pointed out, sanitary arrangements in the city of Sukkur (that contained large numbers of refugee migrants) had deteriorated markedly: [There are] [n]o drainage arrangements in Maulvi Abdullah Lane, opposite Nishat Cinema Sukkur, with the result that filthy water accumulates in soaked pits, dug by people in front of their houses. This causes a very bad odour on [the] one hand and creates poisonous germs of cholera and malaria 20 21 22

p. 5.

A Victim, Karachi, ‘Bus Permits’, Dawn, 15 December, 1951, p. 5. Ghayas Ahmad Siddiqui, Karachi, ‘Bus Routes’, Dawn, 14 February, 1952, p. 5. Fida M. Jaffer, Karachi, ‘Improve Karachi-Sind Buses’, Dawn, 7 April, 1952,

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on the other. The Municipality also makes dirty water of neighbouring streets flow into this lane, which has doubled the pangs of the poor residents. . .[T]he Administrator of Sukkur Municipality [has been] approached many a time in deputation in this connection and a number of petitions were also submitted to him to make the necessary arrangements for [an improved] drainage system . . . no heed has been paid.23

Another correspondent, this time complaining in vivid fashion about the state of Jacob Lines (a neighbourhood in Karachi where many government servants themselves lived), highlighted the daily challenge of living in such unclean surroundings: Permit me to bring to notice of authorities of Karachi Cantonment and the Central Government the deplorable insanitary conditions prevailing in Jacob Lines. The huts and tent[s] of refugees have encircled the government quarters situated in the rear part of this colony like the web of a spider. On account of this congestion of huts, even a rickshaw cannot pass through at most places. This is resulting in enormous inconvenience and trouble to the government servants who deserve special attention of the authorities concerned. Their family members have to alight down from taxis and victorias [horse-drawn carriages] etc at the main road in order to reach their residence on foot as the passage is almost blocked. Besides the huts have no means of disposal of human excretion. Heaps of it are seen lying around the quarters, emitting stench and breeding mosquitoes and other infecting worms. At certain places big pits have been dug out for the storage of filthy water outside the huts. The passers-by usually slip into these pits in darkness. To crown all, some people are allowed to keep milch cattle for business purposes even in this congested area. Recently a buffalo went wild and proved a source of terror and damage to the inhabitants, and had to be shot down to death. It is evident that all these irregularities are going on unchecked by the authorities concerned. We do not press for complete eradiation [sic] of huts and tents of refugees from this place. But the government can make arrangements for maintaining sanitary conditions. They can be persuaded to shift their huts and tents to spacious places in or behind Jacob Lines or to some other suitable site. The cattle keepers (whether government servants or refugees) can also be directed not to keep their cattle outside or near the government quarters.24

As far as the provision of other sorely-needed public facilities was concerned, the following examples reflect the tone of the correspondence on these matters. A letter in March 1952 commented on the sorry provision of public conveniences in the city: There have been many complaints against the Municipal Corporation with regard to the insanitary condition of Karachi but with little result. The 23 24

A Sufferer, Sukkur, ‘Insanitation in Sukkur’, Dawn, 28 January, 1952, p. 5. A Jacob Liner, Karachi, ‘Dirty Jacob Lines’, Dawn, 16 December, 1951, p. 7.

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Corporation authorities do not perhaps like to do anything. After a long time and after repeated public request, the city was provided with some urinals at certain important points in the city, but that was, in my opinion, a sheer waste of money. These urinals have become a nuisance. A glance at these urinals with urine flowing all around will convince one that they are of no use until proper arrangements are made to clean them a few times during the day. The present condition indicates that they are seldom attended by the Municipal Health staff. Surprise checks by the senior peoples and effective action against defaulters can only improve the matter.25

Similar dissatisfaction with the authorities’ failure to act appropriately can be detected in this following letter regarding access to other kinds of public facilities. As its female writer complained: Burns Garden is for the enjoyment of the public of Karachi. Since the day it was thrown open to the public some thirty years ago a portion of it was earmarked for the exclusive use of women-folk and was called the Ladies Park. Now some persons have somehow managed to get the Ladies Park allotted to themselves and have built private houses and are living there. They do not allow the women of Karachi to enter the place and claim to be the exclusive owners of the place. [Will] the authorities concerned look into this.26

Equally, as underlined in another letter published in February 1952, persuading the authorities to look into a matter could prove a highly frustrating experience: In May last year I presented to Karachi Municipal Corporation [KMC] a petition praying for the construction of a pucca lighted road and bridge on the Lyari bed and constructing a wall round the graveyard in Lalukhet. I was told that the matter will be looked into and everything possible will be done. The KMC gave no reply for a long time. I therefore again called to enquire what action had been taken on my petition. I was sent with written instructions to the Land Manager, who is the official responsible for dealing with the matter and to whom I learnt my petition had been transferred. I went there but received no encouragement I was even told that thousands of such petitions were received daily from the public and that I should not expect a reply. I could neither succeed in having my petition traced nor knowing its disposal. I tried to impress upon the authorities the importance of the matter but to no avail. I have again addressed the KMC for an appropriate action in the matter. I hope that the higher authorities will take practical steps to meet the public demands.27

The third issue that moved large numbers of correspondents to write to Dawn during this period were particular crises that proved 25 26 27

S. M. Safdar, Karachi, ‘Urinals’, Dawn, 3 March, 1952, p. 5. Rashida Bano, Karachi, ‘Burns Gardern’, Dawn, 21 January, 1952, p. 5. G. Mohammad, Karachi, ‘Lalukhet Graveyard’, Dawn, 22 February, 1952, p. 5.

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Figure 1 ‘The Tamasha’: Karachi Corporation is taking steps to relieve the water shortage in the city, Dawn, 26 April 1952, p. 5: standpipe caption reads ‘KARACHI WATER SUPPLY’, caption on the shirt of the man holding the ladder reads ‘ADVISORY COMMITTEE’, and caption on the shirt of the man climbing the ladder reads ‘MUNICIPAL CORPORATION’.

very disruptive to daily life, such as the acute water supply problems that gripped Karachi during March to May 1952 (see Figure 1). As well as the ongoing food rationing caused by nationwide shortages. In both cases, readers of the newspaper sought to draw attention to the apparent unwillingness (at least in their view) of the local authorities to deal with their problems sympathetically, and they questioned the role of officials in the relevant departments. Hence this appeal that appeared in April 1952:

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I wish to draw the attention of the authorities concerned to the deplorable state of affairs of the Municipal Corporation in connection with the water supply to the inhabitants of Pir Ellahi Bux Colony. As all know, prior to taking up the responsibility and management of water supply to the Colony by the Municipal Corporation this work had been done by private individuals. So long [as] this work [was] being done by these private individuals, there was not a single complaint against them for any sort. But the Municipal Corporation under the tall talk of supplying the water regularly at a nominal rate and thus relieving the inhabitants from the clutches of private individuals who were charging two annas per mashak [volume of water] took the management into their own hands. Since the Municipal Corporation has taken over the responsibilities in their hands not a single drop of water is found in the Colony for days together. Little children run from one door to other requesting to give them a tumbler of water to quench their thirst but nobody could help them. The Management and Staff of the Colony was appraised of these state of affairs but it seems it fell on deaf ears. The Staff and Bahishti [suppliers of water] showed their irresponsible attitude and laugh at us.

Like many other indignant letters written at this time, this one ended with a request to Dawn’s Editor to ‘kindly move the authorities to ensure that such trouble is removed’.28 Correspondence focussing on the problem of food shortages ranged from the polite to the insistent. In February 1952, at a time when there was an increase in the rationing of food stuffs, and consequently much discussion of the authorities’ inability to deal effectively with the twin (supposedly contributing) evils of smuggling and black-marketeering, a self-styled ‘housewife’ from Karachi pointed out that: During [the] past few days it has become painfully clear that our Food Minister [Abdus Sattar Pirzada29 ] is not bearing his responsibilities as it should be. We who were a surplus nation in food grains and were proud of this achievement have been reduced to a sorry state overnight. Our Food Minister has suggested that we should eat more rice but does he realise that rice is more expensive than wheat besides having less nutritional value? Many of us who have large families to support rely on just one earning member. Our hopes of an appreciable reduction in food prices are not mere rosy dreams. 28 M. A. S. Baig, ‘Water Supply in Pir Ellahi Bux Colony’, Dawn, 16 April, 1952, p. 5. Dawn’s editor at this time was Altaf Hussain, who enjoyed close connections with leading ‘refugee’ politicians and bureaucrats alike. 29 Abdul Sattar Pirzada, a leading politician from Upper Sindh, was one of the few Sindhis in the central government during this period. As minister with responsibility for food supplies during a period when there were shortages in essential foodstuffs, he (not surprisingly perhaps) came in for serious personal criticism from the general public. Rice was a staple part of the Sindhi diet—it is likely, therefore, that this particular correspondent was originally from northern India where rice had a less central role to play in what people ate on a daily basis.

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May we request the Food Ministry to awaken from its slumber and launch an immediate and vigorous drive against smugglers and black-marketeers?30

Similarly, an indignant-sounding correspondent from Sukkur took the authorities to task when it came to putting a halt to blackmarketeering: Responsibility for the black-market in food grains in Sind should also be shared by the Provincial Civil Supplies department. They do not properly plan the procurement and distribution of food grains. They have no proper staff in the districts to enforce control orders. Their instructions to the district authorities are always incomplete with loopholes for [the] black-market to flourish. In my opinion, the Department needs a complete overhauling.31

By September 1952, with austerity officially the order of the day (see Figure 2) frustration at the food situation had intensified further as this example demonstrated: Thanks for your today bold editorial on food but you should have demanded the removal of (1) the Food Minister against whom so many and so loud complaints have appeared in the Press and also placed before the Government. No democracy harbours a Minister once he is openly charged. If you agree, please demand his removal immediately. The nation demands it. His own record requires it and above all the country’s interests urge it. [You should also have demanded] (2) the removal of certain Food Ministry officials against whom your own Gujarati Edition and other vernacular Press has been crying hoarse for last so many months. It is said that they are hand in glove with city’s Ration Depot Holders and other crooks in hushing up serious food crimes and yet nobody seems to do anything. May I also request our Chief Commissioner, AT Naqvi to get Karachi’s Rationing Department detached from the Central Food Ministry and improve its internal tone and administration?32

As this letter indicates, the final area of concern, and again criticism, that emerges particularly strongly from Dawn’s letter pages during this period relates to the persistent abuse of bureaucratic power. Whether in the form of bribery, corruption or nepotism, ordinary Pakistanis found themselves coming face to face on a daily basis with what they frequently termed ‘graft’. The problem had not escaped the attention of the higher authorities: indeed, reports of corrupt officers being apprehended frequently appeared in the press. In January 1953,

30 31 32

A Housewife, Karachi, ‘Food’, Dawn, 23 February, 1952, p. 5. Rashid Ahmed, Sukkur, Sind, ‘Blackmarket’, Dawn, 26 February, 1952, p. 5. M. Ibrahim, Karachi, ‘Food’, Dawn, 15 September, 1952, p. 5.

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Figure 2 Fifth Anniversary Extra: Austerity Parade, Dawn, 14 August, 1952, p. 5: placard slogan reads ‘AUSTERITY PARADE’, while the sash on the marcher taking the salute reads ‘THE PAKISTANI CONSUMERS’.

while exhorting public servants in Sindh to ‘make it really hot for him [sic] who defies the law of the land’, Sindh’s Governor Din Mohammad (who had recently suspended the provincial government) warned that should such miscreants disregard his direction and persist ‘in their traditional depredations. . .they [would] receive no quarter’. The Governor, delivering his warning in a Pakistan Radio broadcast, emphasized that, at what was a sensitive time in the evolution of the administration, civil servants were effectively ‘on trial’ and, if they were to achieve success, then they had to develop the virtues of honesty, efficiency, devotion to duty, courtesy to their fellow beings, and loyalty to the state. No pains, Din Muhammad insisted, would be spared to rid the body-politic of all its existing ailments.33 All the same, as letters to Dawn indicated, the problem diminished the authority of those who represented the state in its day-to-day dealings with the general public: 33

Dawn, 9 January, 1953, p. 9.

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A certain clerk in the Rehabilitation Department, Golimar Section dared to change the entries in the official register of plots to suit his purpose by over writing his own name obliterating original possessors’ names and by assigning a wrong number to the plots . . . and finally taking possession of the same forcibly, although the original possessors had pucca compound walls around the plots for the last 4 years when perhaps there was no trace of this clerk in Karachi. When a hue and cry was raised by the oppressed persons the higher authorities issued the necessary Stay Orders. Such clerks bring the administrative machinery into disrepute and need to be dealt with sternly.34

A similar argument was put forward by a correspondent from Hyderabad, who drew attention to the widespread dissatisfaction that existed with regard to government officials in general and the (notoriously ineffective) Anti-Corruption department in particular. As his letter suggested, the all-too-common abuse of bureaucratic privileges was undermining public confidence to the extent that the department concerned had lost much, if not all, of its credibility: If investigations were to be made, instances would be made available where reports have been made to the Anti-Corruption staff and officials have been caught with Government property in their houses, or documents and bills for materials and stores supplied by local contractors at absurd prices and labour registers with false entries have been seized, but these cases have eventually been suppressed by official pressure and the informants have been victimised and hounded out of their jobs in the Government after having been declared dangerous subjects in departmental circulars. It is time that privileges for officers and subordinates of Gazetted rank be abolished. The Government should establish without any delay Tribunals of unofficial persons who are considered honest and impartial in their sense of Justice. . .and the whereabouts of the Tribunals should be advertised from time to time if the Government are really out to stop graft and corruption at this stage. The views of the public who are interested in the administration of justice may help in the campaign against corruption and graft if pushed with vigour.35

It was not only the suspect activities of civil servants, whether high or low, in government departments that generated criticism. There was also the attitude of others who worked for the state towards those whom they were supposed to be serving. As the ‘Citizen’ in the last letter included here pointed out in relation to the police force (and as Figure 3 also suggests) these particular representatives of the new state still had a long way to go in terms of how well they were perceived to be treating the general public: 34 35

A. M. Siddiqi, Garden West, Karachi 3, ‘Graft’, Dawn, 28 January, 1953, p. 5. A. M. Baloch, Hyderabad,‘Graft’, Dawn, 23 February, 1953, p. 5.

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Figure 3 ‘Dis-Grace’37 : The crime wave in the Pakistan Capital is on the increase, Dawn, [spring] 1952, p. 5: reading clockwise from top left ‘BLACKMAIL and VIOLENCE’; ‘MURDER and ROBBERY’; ‘IMPRACTICAL PREVENTIVE METHOD OF CRIME DETECTION’; ‘THE UNHOLY ALLIANCE’; ‘COMPLACENCE of the LAW—HEY WAKE UP I HAVE BEEN MUGGED’.

The police in the Federal Capital have not changed their mentality. They still think themselves the minions of the old British Government instead of considering themselves as public servants. Whenever a citizen, however respectable he may be, visits the police station to lodge a complaint, the Police Inspector down to the constable pay scant regard to him and instead of giving any hearing to him behave with him most rudely. Corruption, favouritism, and ills of drinking and debauchery are the order of the day in their rank and file. Will the authorities concerned look into the matter and try to better the organisation.36 36

A Citizen, Karachi, ‘Our Police’, Dawn, 31 January, 1953, p. 5. Sir Gilbert Grace was the then Inspector-General of Police for Karachi, hence Dawn’s play on his surname in this cartoon. 37

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Such letters as these to Dawn, taken en masse, undoubtedly present a dramatic picture of the concerns of Pakistanis who were living through what were difficult times in the years following independence and partition, and for much of this time lacking an effective political voice. The extent to which the reality of Pakistan—certainly from the perspective of Karachi and Sindh—was failing to live up to the expectations that had been raised by its creation was palpable, and not helped by the restricted democratic processes at work here. No national elections took place during this period, and while occasional provincial polls were conducted, those in Sindh (postponed a number of times until they finally took place in May 1953) were tarred (as elsewhere) by accusations of vote-rigging and other electoral misdemeanours.38 Unlike neighbouring Punjab, where refugee representatives acquired seats in the Provincial Assembly, taking the place of non-Muslim members who had left for India, the Sindh Legislative Assembly did not make the same space available for refugee interests. The city of Karachi simply lacked representation, whether for refugees or earlier residents, at both the local and higher level throughout most of this period. So, while the level of patriotic exhortation may have still been high, with the emphasis on Pakistan’s new citizens looking beyond their perhaps difficult immediate personal circumstances and working to improve the overall condition of the nation (Dawn’s editorial stance, for instance, remained firmly ‘nationalist’ throughout this period), what these letter writers in their different ways communicated was a clear sense of ordinary Pakistanis expecting more from the new state on a day-to-day level than it, at this stage in its political or economic development, was able to deliver. Citizens of a new country, won (as they saw it) at the expense of great effort and suffering, they considered themselves to be entitled to better treatment than they were receiving at the hands of the state’s representatives. Indeed, it was the apparent contradiction between what ‘Pakistan’ had seemed to promise at its creation and the realities that it was now delivering which formed a major recurrent theme whenever the shortcomings of the new state were discussed. While the lack of a constitution and debates on the place of Islam occupied column space, and worried letter-writing correspondents, many of the key questions of the time were more mundane, if no less pressing. At their core lay a 38 See ‘Summary of Political Events for Week Ending May 1 [1953]’, Despatch 757, 790.00/5–253, United States National Archives.

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desire within civil society to hold the state accountable for its failings to address people’s everyday needs.39 Life, in the opinion of many of those who wrote to Dawn during this period, was supposed to be better than it had been before independence but, for most, it seemed that little had really changed in tangible terms. And, as a May 1952 editorial in Dawn reminded its readers, this longer-term perspective was all-important when it came to understanding what went into the making of citizenship at the everyday level of people’s encounters with the state: It is fashionable to decry the long period of foreign rule as the source of endless administrative abuses. The trouble is in fact much older and has followed from the temper traditionally associated with authority. True it is that the generality of the foreign rulers of this subcontinent felt themselves to be under no obligation or compulsion to be well-behaved towards the subject people; nor did they consider it necessary to require their subordinate functionaries to be courteous towards the general public coming in daily touch with them. But now that the old distance between ruler and ruled— maintained by racial arrogance, social segregation and official haughtiness— has been eliminated, a new and more human spirit among the country’s public servants is to be expected. The change for the better can be sensed, but it cannot establish itself as long as unwholesome legacies are allowed to persist. It is absolutely necessary that all Government departments, and particularly those coming in daily contact with the common people, should make courtesy the rule. . .Observation of courtesy is essential if a favourable atmosphere for the elimination of inefficiency and corruption from the service is to be created.40

39 For discussion of related themes of refugee resettlement and rehabilitation in the context of late twentieth-century Calcutta (and West Bengal), see Partha Chatterjee, The Rights of the Governed (Kampala: Centre for Basic Research, 2003). 40 Dawn, 17 May, 1952, p. 5.

C Cambridge University Press 2010 Modern Asian Studies 45, 1 (2011) pp. 179–200.  doi:10.1017/S0026749X10000259 First published online 3 November 2010

Concrete ‘progress’: irrigation, development and modernity in mid-twentieth century Sind DANIEL HAINES Department of History, Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham, TW20 0EX, UK Email: [email protected]

Abstract The idea of ‘developing’ Sind has been a lynchpin of government action and rhetoric in the province during the twentieth century. The central symbols of this ‘development’ were three barrage dams, completed between 1932 and 1962. Because of the barrages’ huge economic and ideological significance, the ceremonies connected with the construction and opening of these barrages provide a unique opportunity to examine the public presentation of state authority by the colonial and postcolonial governments. This paper investigates the way that ideas of ‘development’ and ‘modernity’ appeared in discourses connected with these ceremonies, in order to demonstrate that the idea of imposing ‘progress’ on a province considered ‘backward’ by the state administrators survived longer than the British regime which had introduced it. The paper begins with the historical links between water-provision and governance in Sind, before examining the way that immediate political concerns of the sitting governments were addressed in connection with the projects, demonstrating the ways in which very similar projects were cast as symbols of different political priorities. The last part of the paper draws out deeper similarities between the logic of these political expressions, in order to demonstrate the powerful continuity in ideologies of ‘progress’ throughout midtwentieth century Sind.

Introduction The idea of ‘developing’ Sind has been a lynchpin of government action and rhetoric in the province during the twentieth century. The most important single element of development during the mid-twentieth century was the massive extension and renovation of Sind’s irrigation system and the corresponding increase in acreage of land available for cultivation. The central symbols of this development were three

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barrage dams—the Lloyd Barrage at Sukkur completed in 1932, the Kotri Barrage completed in 1955, and the Gudu Barrage completed in 1962. This paper will examine the way that ideas of development and modernity were inscribed in discourses surrounding the ceremonial events connected with these projects, in order to demonstrate that the idea of imposing progress on a province considered backward by its administrators survived longer than the British regime which had introduced it. Because of the vital agricultural and economic importance of the Barrages to Sind, these ceremonies were major events, in which the harnessing of a capricious natural resource (the River Indus) signified the rulers’ mastery over their territory. As such, the ceremonies provide a unique window onto the public presentation of state authority before and after Independence. The power of ritual in locating states in relation to the peoples whom they govern is well-known to the humanities. In terms of colonial India, this scholarship has considered a range of angles, from the shift from princes to nationalist leaders participating in imperial ceremonies during the twentieth-century Raj,1 to the tension produced by the way that ceremonies function as a performative arena for diverse interests at the same time as the hegemony of the organizer is asserted over the actors.2 The question of ‘performativity’ in the postcolonial state has also been considered, especially by Mbembe in the African context.3 In the context of South Asian irrigation, Tennekoon has illuminated the way in which state-led rituals connected with river-development projects in Sri Lanka have established the material conditions of modernization and the privileging of science and technology in association with a centralized state bureaucracy.4 Such an approach has not been taken to development in Pakistan. Important work by Ali, Islam, and Gilmartin on British-era canal colonies in the Punjab have not looked beyond Independence, and have not extended their analysis

1 Douglas Haynes, ‘Imperial Ritual in a Local Setting: The Ceremonial Order in Surat, 1890–1939’, Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 24, No. 3 (1990), pp. 493–527. 2 Alan Trevithick, ‘Some Structural and Sequential Aspects of the British Imperial Assemblages at Delhi: 1877–1911’, Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 24, No. 3 (1990), pp. 561–578. 3 Achille Mbeme, On the Postcolony (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), especially Chapter 3. 4 N. Serena Tennekoon, ‘Rituals of Development: the Accelerated Mahavali Development Program of Sri Lanka’, American Ethnologist, Vol. 15, No. 2 (1988), pp. 294–310.

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beyond the Punjab province.5 Although histories of Sind have taken British canal-construction into account,6 relatively little is understood about how the relationship between irrigation and state changed after 1947. This paper is not a detailed analysis of the ceremonies so much in terms of ritual and performance, rather (whilst bearing in mind the impact that the performativity of ceremonies has) they are treated as moments in which the state’s hegemony over the native people and environment were most forcefully asserted. Furthermore, the ceremonies provided anchors for public discussions about the projects, and about the state of development in Sind more generally, and revealed the continuing importance of the idea that bringing progress to Sind was the preserve—and duty—of those in power. Yet despite changing political contexts, the ceremonies displayed striking similarities in their deployment of the idea of ‘progress’. The terms ‘development’, ‘modernity’ and ‘progress’ in the Imperial and Pakistani lexicons were politically and morally loaded and, crucially, were considered to be the domains of the state and its agents. Moreover, all participants and commentators seemed to welcome the Barrages, even though the potential problems of waterlogging and salinity were well-known beforehand. Within Englishlanguage media, the projects were almost universally cast as bringers of productivity and prosperity. Indeed, they were considered the solution to Sind’s notorious backwardness, which was thought to have been a product of the province’s socio-economic order, and of the irregularity of crop-cultivation which resulted from farmers’ dependence on the unpredictable Indus for irrigation water. There were, of course, differences too. Most importantly, the type of progress promoted by the British administration was almost entirely technological. After Independence, the rhetoric also turned on Sind’s supposedly ‘feudal’ society. These differences represented responses to

5 Imran Ali, The Punjab under Imperialism, 1885–1947 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988); M. Mufakharul Islam, Irrigation, Agriculture and the Raj: Punjab, 1887–1947 (New Delhi: Manohar, 1997); David Gilmartin, ‘Migration and Modernity: The State, the Punjabi Village, and the Settling of the Canal Colonies’, in Ian Talbot and Shinder Thandi (eds), People on the Move: Punjabi Colonial and Post-Colonial Migration (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 3–17. 6 David Cheesman, Landlord Power and Rural Indebtedness in Colonial Sind, 1865–1901 (London: Curzon Press, 1997), pp. 30–77; Hamida Khuhro, The Making of Modern Sindh: British Policy and Social Change in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 153–169.

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the political challenges facing the respective governments. However, the representation of the state’s relationship with modernity was almost identical. British mastery over Indians in the material and technological fields, and Indians’ reciprocal preoccupation with ‘culture’ and ‘spirit’, was a well-established binary in colonialnationalist dialogues by the 1930s, and has received a great deal of important critical attention.7 British discussions of the Lloyd Barrage project certainly provide reinforcing evidence for this body of scholarship. This paper goes further in exploring some of the continuities between British-Indian and Pakistani attitudes towards the problem of development and infrastructure-construction in Sind, in order to highlight the carrying-over of British colonial ideology into the post-independence state. The sources used fall into two groups: records of the speeches which were made by government personnel at the ceremonies, and commemorative booklets issued there, and contemporary newspaper reports.8 Of the latter, the focus remains on the opening ceremonies, but other relevant articles have been included to provide more evidence of the progress-discourse. The sources used are all in the English language, which was the language of governance in Britishruled Sind and in post-Independence Pakistan, and was therefore used at the opening ceremonies, and for reports in important national newspapers. Moreover, one of the components of the ideology of progress was the opposition between officials and the educated elite’s approach to the projects, as well as the ‘parochial’, discountable objections raised by ‘backward’ Sindhis.9 7 Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Post-colonial Histories (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), pp. 6–11. 8 Research for this paper failed to reveal any official material or newspaper articles concerning the Gudu Barrage opening ceremony in 1962. Therefore, the narrative of the Gudu foundation-stone-laying ceremony has been used. 9 The vernacular press in Sind sometimes took issue with the way that the projects were constructed, and worries abounded among zamindars outside the areas which the projects irrigated. But the response of the Anglophone community—British and Indian/Pakistani—was often derisive. For instance, an article in the Bombay-based Times of India in 1930 refused to ‘[A]ccept the definition of the more moderate of the Sind journals we have referred to above that “by the word foreigner we mean all nonSindhis”; and it is hardly to be expected that such an interpretation will appeal to the people of this [Bombay] Presidency whose credit stands pledged for the repayment of the vast sums which are being expended on the Lloyd Barrage Scheme’. This clearly iterates the financial imperative behind discounting Sindhi opposition to the scheme [‘Land in the Lloyd Barrage Area’, Times of India (Bombay), 5 May, 1930. Collected in India Office Records (IOR) Private Papers, MSS EUR E 372/2]. After Independence,

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This paper initially sets out the long historical links between waterprovision and governance in Sind, to show why the projects were executed on a practical political level. The next section examines the way that the short- and medium-term political needs of the sitting governments were rhetorically addressed in connection with the projects, and demonstrates the ways in which very similar projects were cast as symbols of different political priorities. The final section draws out the deeper similarities between the logic of these political expressions, in order to demonstrate the powerful continuity in ideologies of ‘progress’ throughout mid-twentieth century Sind, and its British Indian and Pakistani regional surroundings. These ideologies centred on the distancing of nature from ‘scientific’ man, with Sindhi cultivators considered to be closer to nature than their British or Pakistani masters—and therefore the distancing was replicated in relations between the governors and the majority of the population. For both colonial and independent governments, this crystallized around the idea that ‘backward’ Sind could be economically and morally improved by the imposition of a scientific irrigation system on the countryside, and scientific cultivation on the agrarian populace, with the Barrages as monuments to the material power of the adepts of scientific knowledge. Water and governance in Sind Governance in Sind has long been intimately connected to the control of water. Almost nothing will grow there without receiving water from the river, either by flooding or through canals. The Indus was famously integral to the ancient Mohenjodaro civilization. More recently, Sind’s Kalhora rulers (1700–1783 CE) expanded and improved the canal system. Their successors, the Talpur Mirs (1783–1843) were less effective in this regard, but did take some responsibility for maintaining the canals.10 The Mirs’ own successors, the British, inherited a wide-ranging and sophisticated canal system. However, it was a truism among early British officers in Sind that the Mirs had

the tension between ‘provincial’ and ‘national’ concerns became a defining feature of the idea of ‘nation-building’—an ideology in which large-scale development projects such as construction of the Barrages played a defining role. 10 M. H. Panhwar, History of Sind Irrigation: 3500 B.C.–Present (Islamabad: Government of Pakistan, Ministry of Science and Technology, Pakistan Council of Research in Water Resources, 1991), p. 66.

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ruined the canal system through neglect of their duty to clear silt and sediments from the channels every year, thus impeding the water’s flow.11 Under the British, Sind remained dependent on canal irrigation, as did much of north-western India: particularly parts of the Punjab, the North-West Province and the North-West Frontier Province. Parallels were also drawn between Sind and other parts of the British Empire, such as Egypt and Sudan.12 However, British Sind lagged far behind its neighbours in irrigation development. In the North-West Province, East India Company engineers had begun renovating the Western and Eastern Jumna Canals as early as the 1820s. In 1840, work had started on the Ganges Canal, to irrigate the whole of the Upper Doab.13 All over northern India, administrative power and water provision were intimately connected, and the government invested a great deal of capital in strengthening this relationship. But in Sind, the physical infrastructure that facilitated it was allowed to remain virtually unchanged, despite the repeated attempts of officials in Sind to put up major canal projects.14 This neglect had become a political liability by the early twentieth century. Writing in support of the proposal to build a Barrage at Sukkur, the Commissioner-in-Sind argued in 1920 that: It is open for agitators at present to point out that comparatively little has been done in Sind of recent years in the way of great works by Government. [. . .] The undertaking of a great scheme such as that now proposed in Sind would undoubtedly have an excellent effect.15

11 Panhwar cites James Hughes, Deputy Collector of Shikarpur in 1847, and Richard Burton. M. H. Panhwar, History of Sind Irrigation, p. 73; Lieutenant Postans, writing in 1841, is cited by E. H. Aitken, Gazetteer of the Province of Sind (Karachi: ‘Mercantile’ Steam Press for the Government [of Bombay?], 1907), p. 258. 12 See Robert Burton Buckley, Irrigation Works in India and Egypt (London: E. & F.N. Spon, 1893); Anonymous, ‘Lord Stanley & the Lloyd Barrage’, n.d., IOR Private Papers MSS EUR E 372/1. Conversely, when Britain was given the post-First World War Mandate in Palestine by the League of Nations, Indian irrigation experiences helped to guide the new administration. K. Gaarde, ‘British Colonial Water Legislation in Mandatory Palestine’, in R. Coopey and T. Tvedt, A History of Water, Volume 2: The Political Economy of Water (London; New York: I.B. Tauris, 2006), p. 178. 13 Graham P. Chapman, The Geopolitics of South Asia: From Early Empires to the Nuclear Age. 2nd Edition (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), p. 119. 14 See Aitken, Gazetteer, p. 262 15 ‘Memorandum by the Commissioner-in-Sind’, dated 14 July, 1920, paragraph 5. Enclosed with Shourbridge to Secretary to G.o.I. P. W.D., 30 July, 1920. Government of Bombay, Public Works Department Irrigation (Works and Accounts), A Proceedings for July 1920, IOR P/10797.

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This justification for barrage-building was rooted in the Sind administration’s current political concerns, in particular about the success of the Khilafat Movement, which protested against the treatment of the defeated Ottoman Empire by the Allies after the First World War. By the time the Commissioner’s memorandum was written, the predominantly urban Khilafat leadership in Sind had obtained the cooperation of many pirs,16 who brought with them the massed support of their rural followers. The British authorities reacted by arresting leading Khilafatists, in line with state action across India.17 The Commissioner, however, revealed an awareness of the need for a carrot as well as a stick. He drew explicitly on the idea of public-works construction as a mark of good governance, and cast the Barrage as part of a wider process of irrigation-system construction in India, which could secure the stability of colonial rule. The Lloyd Barrage, therefore, stood as a symbol of the government’s vested political interest in cultivation. Work finally began on the Barrage project at Sukkur in 1923. The decision had been made partly on the aforementioned political grounds, partly on the grounds that irrigation development in Punjab on the Indus tributaries would harm water availability in Sind, and partly because of the lure of increased revenue receipts which would accrue from the massive increase in the area that could be put under profitable crops in the province. The Lloyd Barrage (named after Sir George Lloyd, the Governor of Bombay who oversaw its inception and construction) was formally opened by Viceroy Willingdon on 13 January, 1932. Over the remaining 15 years of British rule, the Barrage system proved its financial and food-producing worth, especially during the grain-shortage crises of the Second World War. During that War, outline plans were prepared for two more weirs on the Indus in Sind: one downstream of Sukkur, to irrigate Middle and Lower Sind, and the other upstream, to irrigate Upper Sind.18 After the Partition of British India and the creation of Pakistan, water in Sind and Punjab suddenly became an international issue, when in 16 Pirs are Sufi Muslim spiritual leaders, considered by their followers to be living saints, who have traditionally wielded considerable temporal power in Sind. Their followers include both Hindus and Muslims. 17 On the growth and suppression of the Khilafat Movement in Sind, see Sarah Ansari, Sufi Saints and State Power: The Pirs of Sind, 1843–1947 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 77–100. 18 Government of Sind, Postwar Development Schemes First Edition (Karachi: Government Press, 1945), pp. 51–68.

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1948 India stopped the flow of water into Pakistan from the Indus tributaries in its (upstream) half of Punjab. The ensuing dispute was not resolved until 1960. Moreover, the huge population ‘transfers’ caused by Partition created a desperate refugee problem in Pakistan: the 1951 Census enumerated seven million people as being of refugee origin.19 During Pakistan’s first few decades in existence, refugee rehabilitation was taken as an integral part of national development by policymakers.20 Pakistan now needed to provide food for its new population, and to raise cash-crops for export in order to boost its critically low foreign-exchange reserves. The existing projects for the new Sind barrages were, therefore, enthusiastically taken up. The first, to irrigate Lower Sind, was constructed at Kotri, and opened on 15 March, 1955; the second, to irrigate Upper Sind, was constructed at Gudu, and became operational in March 1962. The opening ceremonies The three barrage projects were, therefore, essential in practical terms to the political and financial survival of the pre- and post-Partition regimes in Sind. But they were also implicated in how administrators viewed themselves and their relationship with the public, and vice versa. The rhetoric surrounding the building of the barrages was sometimes so forceful and dramatic in scope that they seemed almost to represent the essence of governance in Sind. They stood as concrete evidence of the effectiveness with which engineering knowledge could be deployed by those who had the resources and the political will. This view was promoted most stridently at public events connected with the barrages: at the laying of foundation-stones before construction, and then the formal openings of the new irrigation systems. At these events, the full pomp of colonial and post-colonial rule was deployed to mark the importance of such large-scale projects. The involvement of top state personnel, such as the Viceroy of India, the Governor-General and (later) the President of Pakistan, emphasized their extra-provincial significance. At these ceremonies, the everyday story of concrete, crops and hard cash was forcefully placed into the grand contexts of the colonial civilizing mission, and Pakistani 19 Ian Talbot, Freedom’s Cry: The Popular Dimension in the Pakistan Movement and Partition Experience in North-West India (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 154. 20 Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar, The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia: Refugees, Boundaries, Histories (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 9.

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nation-building. Moreover, the profile of these ceremonies—and of the barrage projects themselves—in the contemporary Anglophone press followed remarkably similar lines to the rhetoric expressed by government officials. On 24 October, 1923, the Governor of Bombay laid the foundation stone for the Lloyd Barrage. The event took place, according to one report, ‘Amid scenes of gorgeous splendour, attended with pomp and ceremony rarely excelled even in the presence of Kings and Princes’.21 The Executive Engineer of the Barrage’s speech outlined the history of the project, from its roots in shelved nineteenth-century irrigation schemes to its sanctioning by the Secretary of State for India. Thus, he cast the story of the Barrage as one in which the tenacity of Sind’s British administrators and engineers finally resulted in the construction of the Barrage system, which would: ‘[C]onvert a desert into a garden, [and] also ensure prosperity to those cultivators who[. . .]live on from year to year in that demoralizing atmosphere which is produced by an uncertain and scanty supply of irrigation water.’22 The Governor himself continued in a heroic vein, declaring that: ‘Nothing indeed could be more strikingly indicative of the magnitude of the problem which this Barrage is to solve than the long story of the many attempts that have been made to convert this great waterless tract into a land of rich harvests.’23 Similarly, a representative of the Hyderabad District Local Board asserted that the Barrage’s ‘[M]agnificence and the beneficial effects[. . .]are not excelled by any attempt that has yet been made for harnessing any of the great rivers of the world’.24 The Governor also expressed an early indication of the celebration of the Barrage as a material fact which would become such a strong recurring theme of the later ceremonies: ‘It is hardly possible to imagine how fine an appearance of massive yet elegant strength this giant work will present to the travellers who approach it by any of the great main roads which it will serve to connect’.25 These statements could seem indicative of little more than self-congratulatory hyperbole. But they demonstrate the Barrage’s potential as a symbol of human endeavour. Nine years later, at the 21 ‘World’s Greatest Irrigation Project’, The Daily Gazette (Karachi), 25 October, 1923. 22 Quoted in ibid. 23 Ibid. 24 Ibid. 25 Ibid.

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same Barrage’s opening ceremony in 1932, this valorization had matured into almost a fetishization of engineering ability—perhaps encouraged by the fact that, once construction was accomplished, the actual existence of the Barrage made for a more convincing emphasis on its material aspects. In a souvenir booklet given out to attendees at the opening ceremony, this valorization was visually represented by the 20 pages of the booklet which consisted solely of photographs of the Barrage and canals, in various stages of completion. In none of these photographs does any human feature prominently. The shots are all of machinery and the Barrage structure itself. Human workers, when they do appear, are dwarfed by the machines they are using and by the products of their labours. In fact, the only shot which specifically shows any living creature in close-up is of two donkeys, with the caption ‘Dumb Workers’.26 For British engineers, their nonrepresentation in the pictures was offset by a list of their names at the back of the booklet. For the thousands of Sindhis, Baluchis and Punjabis who worked on the project there is barely a mention, except in connection with the operation of plant machinery. Judging by the souvenir booklet alone, the progress which the Barrage and canals embodied would seem to be primarily technological. While the administrative and logistical challenges it had presented were also mentioned, it was the scientific construction of the project which received the most attention. At the opening ceremony of the Kotri Barrage 23 years later in 1955, there was a similar implication that the type of ‘progress’ embodied by the new Barrage depended on technological development. Sind’s Chief Minister, Mohammed Ayub Khuhro, emphasized the Barrage’s visual impact on the landscape: While no money has been wasted on purely ornamental or decorative features, every thought has been given to the appearance of the Barrage so that it may have the natural good looks of a structure—soundly built, and with all its parts severely designed to carry out their functions without waste or grandioseness.27 26 N.a., The Opening of The Lloyd Barrage and Canals by His Excellency The Earl of Willingdon, G.M.S.I., G.C.M.G., G.M.I.E., G.B.E., Viceroy and Governor General of India on Wednesday, the 13th January 1932 (Bombay: The Government Central Press, [1932?]), p. 23. 27 Speech of the Hon’ble Mr. M.A. Khuhro, Chief Minister of Sind, on the occasion of the Opening Ceremony of the Kotri Barrage by His Excellency the Governor-General of Pakistan on 15th March 1955, p. 4. In United Kingdom National Archives (U.K.N.A.) File DO 35/8581: ‘The Kotri Barrage Project, Pakistan’.

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By making practical and cost-effective construction work into an aesthetic statement, Khuhro allowed the sheer material solidity of the dam to stand for the work it represented, and the faith in scientific agriculture it manifested. In doing so, he followed the logic of the photographs in the Lloyd Barrage souvenir booklet. Moreover, he now claimed the same scientific expertise for Pakistan which had previously been the preserve of the British rulers: ‘The project’, he said, was: [C]onstructed by Pakistani Engineers and staff with the exception of the Chief Engineer and a few British Engineers, never more than five and for most of the time considerably less, who were chiefly required on the mechanical side. [. . .] With one partial exception, all the canal works are being executed either directly or by Pakistani Contractors.28

Khuhro was here claiming that Pakistanis had successfully taken on and reproduced the scientific knowledge which British administrators had deemed such an important marker of British superiority only three decades previously. Since the original plans for the Kotri Barrage had been laid under British administration, this perhaps bordered on the disingenuous. But by judging the independent state’s action’s by the same criteria used by the colonial state, Khuhro drew attention to the similar ideological space which both administrations sought to occupy. In both cases, such an emphasis on technical aspects elided the very important social and political implications of such large irrigation projects. But Khuhro was not the top state representative present at the Kotri ceremony, and it was the Governor-General, Ghulam Mohammad, who took Viceroy Willingdon’s ceremonial role as the man to formally open the project. The format of the ceremony seems to have been similar—featuring the country’s political figurehead, decorative bunting, speeches extolling the Barrages’ virtues and those of the engineers who had built them—but Ghulam Mohammad departed from the Sukkur template by directly addressing contemporary political issues. In particular, he promoted his government’s ostensibly pro-peasant political stance. The opening paragraph of his speech declared that:

28

Speech by the Hon’ble Mr. M.A. Khuhro, p. 2.

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[N]othing gives me greater pleasure than to watch the completion of a project which directly benefits the common man, and is destined to produce more food for Pakistan’s millions whose welfare is very dear to my heart.29

The Governor-General went on to emphasize the improvements in food supply which the Barrage would deliver, and to place the Barrage in the context of his government’s wider economic and development policies. All of these statements emphasized the role of the central government in promoting economic and industrial progress in general, and agricultural development in particular. Ghulam Mohammad was, in short, using his speech to promote his own political agenda. This became much more pronounced in the last part of the speech, in which he declared that: [I]n distributing land care should be taken that we do not give such land to big landlords and thus add to our difficulties. [. . .] In the past, I am afraid, there has been some lack of fair play in this regard, and I do hope and believe that the government of Sind shall strain every nerve to mend the conditions and improve the distribution in the best interest of the common man. [. . .] The common man, whether a refugee or a local, is the core of our nation and all our schemes and projects must aim at ameliorating the hardships of his day to day life.

The appeal to the common man was perhaps inflected by the fact that Ghulam Mohammad’s central government had begun almost bypassing democratic processes during the previous year, an act which foreshadowed Ayub Khan’s 1958 military coup. By emphasizing the state’s relationship with everyday citizens, Ghulam Mohammad sought to demonstrate a direct identification with the people outside the political classes, a populist legitimacy for his regime. This endeavour, of course, represented the finest colonial tradition of declaring political challengers to be the non-representative ‘elite’, and, in the same manner as the colonial government, claimed that the modernist and progressive military and civil bureaucracy ought to rule a people who were too culturally primitive to be trusted with democracy. This idea was certainly taken up, to some extent, by the press. The Karachi-based weekly, Commerce, sought to annex his speech to its own correspondent’s opinions: The Governor General did not say this in so many words but we have no doubt that he felt it as keenly as many people do that in resisting agrarian reforms 29 Speech of His Excellency the Governor-General at the Opening Ceremony of the Kotri Barrage, 15 March, 1955, p. 2. In U.K.N.A. File DO 35/8581.

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in the country the feudal lords were precipitating conditions which would in the end spell a disaster for them.30

Here, the use of the word ‘feudal’ suggested an open conflict between the old and the new: the image was not of a class struggle between big landlords and their haris (cultivators who worked a landlord’s land), but of an endangered reactionary group fighting a rearguard action against the natural—and national—march of progress. Conversely, the state’s representative, the Governor-General, was associated with progress. This suggested that the modernization of agriculture, both technical and cultural, was an inevitable part of the Pakistani national story. Similarly, a report on the opening ceremony in Dawn stated that: ‘A proud day was recorded in Pakistan’s history when the Pakistan Governor-General yesterday flew into Hyderabad’ to perform the opening ceremony.31 The ‘national story’ aspect of the Kotri ceremony was characteristic of early-independence Pakistan.32 Accordingly, it was repeated at the foundation-stone-laying ceremony for the Gudu Barrage, which took place on 2 February, 1957. In an address presented to President Iskander Mirza by the West Pakistan Minister of Communications and Works, engineering expertise was presented as fundamental to national development: In the development of any country the Engineers have to play a great part. In our young country we need more Engineers and good Engineers. The task of constructing this new Nation will mainly fall on their shoulders. [. . .] Our Irrigation Engineers have already made their mark and I am happy to say this Barrage is entirely the work of our Pakistani Engineers.33

Mirza, in his reply, enunciated the same theme: [T]he engineering profession holds a place of honour among the other leading professions in a nation-building programme. [. . .] The country expects that

30

‘Kotri Barrage’, Commerce (Karachi), 19 March, 1955. ‘Impressive Ceremony’, Dawn (Karachi), 16 March, 1955. 32 The concept of ‘nation building’ was a favourite post-Independence trope and covered various aspects of moral and material ‘national progress’. For instance Sind Information, a Government of Sind journal, carried a column called ‘Towards Nation Building’, which, to cite one issue, reported on the opening of new workshops, sea port development, and the functioning of a new labour exchange. ‘Towards Nation Building’, Sind Information (Karachi), 1:4 (1948), 101. 33 Address presented to Major-General Iskander Mirza, President of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, on the occasion of the foundation stone laying ceremony of Gudu Barrage. In U.K.N.A. File BT11/5110, ‘Pakistan: Upper Sind or Gudu Barrage’. 31

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they will live up to their reputation in the execution of this Project and thus contribute to the building of a better, happier and prosperous Pakistan.34

A commemorative booklet which was issued at the Gudu ceremony pictorially represented ordinary barrage-workers to a much greater extent than the Lloyd Barrage booklet had done, but it still supported the dominance of engineering with a wealth of technical detail and photographs of earthworks.35 Alongside this by-now familiar celebration of the project’s materiality, the immediate political context again formed a theme of the speeches here. The address to Mirza noted that the integration of Sind (and other former provinces) into the huge West Pakistan province under the One Unit Scheme36 meant that non-Sindhi land could be irrigated without causing provincial disputes.37 The Scheme, then, allowed the more rational implementation of development projects, free of the former provinces’ administrative and political borders. This point had previously been made—although not in the context of an administratively united West Pakistan—by an important Sindhi geographer in a newspaper article as early as 1948. ‘There is no doubt’, he wrote, [T]hat the concept of ‘region’ has to be developed in the solution of Pakistan’s problems and the haphazard political boundaries have to be discarded at any rate. That all artificial political boundaries are a nuisance in our work of national planning is beginning to be realised at long last. [. . .] No longer shall we think in terms of the N.W.F.P., West Punjab, Sind, and Baluchistan, but the main PHYSIOGRAPHIC [sic] regions[.]38

During the ‘One Unit’ period, the West Pakistan administration was able to take such a regional approach. Moreover, Khuhro’s own speech at the Kotri ceremony refrained from attacking Punjabis precisely because he had recently been reinstated as Sind’s Chief Minister by the federal government on the understanding that he would promote

34 Iskander Mirza, speaking on 2 February, 1957, speech transcribed in U.K.N.A. File BT11/5110, ‘Pakistan: Upper Sind or Gudu Barrage’. 35 Gudu Barrage Project (N.p.: Directorate of Information, Government of West Pakistan, n.d.). In U.K.N.A. File BT11/5110. 36 The One Unit Scheme merged Sind with Punjab, Baluchistan, and the NorthWest Frontier Province to form a new province called ‘West Pakistan’. It proved to be unpopular with Pakistani Bengalis, Sindhis, and Balochis, and was reversed by Yahya Khan in 1970. 37 Address presented to Major-General Iskander Mirza. 38 Maneck B. Pithawalla, ‘Water resources of the dry zones in Pakistan’, Sind Observer Illustrated Sunday Supplement (Karachi), 26 September, 1948.

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the One Unit Scheme to his Sindhi constituency.39 On a practical level, the administrative scheme allowed Gudu water to be sent outside the former Sind province. On an ideological level, it forced a project that originated with the Sind Government to bend to the rhetorical requirements of a drive to erase pre-Pakistan political loyalties. ‘Progress’ and ‘modernity’ under changing regimes The rhetoric displayed at these occasions maintained a remarkable continuity in the discursive language they deployed. The routine calls for self-sacrifice in the name of ‘nation building’ in post-Independence Pakistan suggested a new tone to ideas of development, but irrigation projects which followed almost identical systemic formats were cast as emblems of different political regimes in almost identical manners. Why this continuity? The very emphasis on engineering expertise as a Pakistani trait seemed to usurp the former colonialists’ claims to superiority over their erstwhile subjects. But this obsession with engineering had firm colonial roots in ideas about what ‘development’ was. The attitude of the ruling classes—especially the bureaucrats and technocrats—in independent Pakistan towards Sindhi agriculture was almost identical to those of their British predecessors. In both periods, the Sindhi cultivator was seen as a malleable material onto which ‘progress’ could be stamped, as the physical landscape could be manipulated by the Barrages. The ideas of ‘progress’ which motivated and accompanied the building of the projects, therefore, ran beyond the valorization of the Barrages’ materiality. One of the foundations of the way that the colonial regime perceived and presented the Lloyd Barrage project was the widely-held attitude that native Sindhi cultivation was slovenly and ineffective. Many years before the project had been accepted, the author of the 1907 Sind Gazetteer had lamented the precedence of leisure over work in Sindhi agrarian culture: [T]he truth is that, in the absence of competition, ambition and every other stimulus which urges the husbandman to get the most he can out of his field, the Sindhi has for generations cherished the gentler ideal of allowing his field to divorce him as little from his hookah as might be compatible with keeping the latter filled.40 39 Ayesha Jalal, The State of Martial Rule: The Origins of Pakistan’s Political Economy of Defence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 200. 40 Aitken, Gazetteer, p. 240.

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Sindhis were compared especially unfavourably with Punjabis,41 who were considered to be model farmers for arid, canal-irrigated land. Punjabi peasants had already proved themselves in Sind during the colonization of Jamrao Canal land, an endeavour in which Sindhi peasants had fared badly.42 The cause of the Sindhis’ lacking in this regard was popularly held to be their historic dependence on the notoriously unreliable Indus, which would rise and fall unpredictably each summer, so that the correct quantity of water could not be guaranteed at the correct time for successful cultivation. The Barrage, by regulating a water supply which the cultivators could rely on for year-to-year consistency, could remedy this. As one Sind official wrote, once a stable water supply was assured, ‘[T]he traditional indolence and fatalism of the Sindhi cultivator may be sought in vain’.43 This same position was more publicly articulated on the first page of the Sukkur Barrage souvenir booklet: The uncertainty of supply, so uncertain that no cultivator has been in a position to forecast what is likely to happen a fortnight ahead, has led to haphazard cultivation and the cultivator has felt that kismet [sic] rather than his own systematic exertions, is the ruling factor in his agricultural operations. To put an end to this uncertainty [. . .] it was necessary to devise some means of assuring a level of the water in the river which would permit of more certain and orderly irrigation conditions.44

The cultivator’s trust in kismat, or fate, was used to draw a binary opposition between ‘spiritual’ India and the ‘modern’ West. The cultivator’s close relationship with the Indus also pointed to a distinction between the Sindhi as limited by the natural world, and the British engineers as its masters. The ability to bring certainty and order to the chaotic process of cultivation became a justification for imposing a new system on the cultivators: physical engineering intersected with socio-cultural engineering. However partial and hesitant the latter may have been, it was integral to the rhetoric which defined the sort of ‘progress’ that the Barrage was expected to instil. This idea found an even more explicit expression in an article

41 Sarah Ansari, ‘Punjabis in Sind: Identity and Power’, International Journal of Punjab Studies Vol. 1, No. 2 (1995): pp. 1–21, 6–8. 42 Untitled note by Dow, dated 16 March, 1926, paragraph 8. IOR Private Papers. MSS EUR E 371/2. 43 Hugh Dow, ‘Note on Sind’, undated (circa mid–late 1920s). IOR Private Papers MSS EUR E372/1. 44 Opening of the Lloyd Barrage, p. 1.

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published in the Bombay-based, English-language, daily newspaper the Times of India. The article reported that: On the morning after the official opening of the Barrage by His Excellency the Viceroy, there might have been witnessed a second opening ceremony, in its way no less impressive. A white-bearded and saffron-robed saint from the north stretched his arms in benediction over each of the canals and in a loud voice intoned a solemn song of praise and prophecy. He gave rather more thanks to God and less to the engineers than His Excellency had done, and was less concerned with history and more with poetry. He looked like a man from a thirsty land, and his picture of the blessings brought by irrigation was a vivid one.45

The article also inscribed a fundamental difference between the material ‘reality’ of the Barrage and the saint’s ‘illusory’ approach to it, which invoked the irrational fields of prophecy and poetry rather than the supposedly solid and objective categories of engineering and history. The audience—expatriate Europeans or English-literate Indians—naturally ‘knew’ that His Excellency’s praise of the engineers and historical progress expressed the true facts of the matter. This again carried the implication that the Barrage, and the engineers who oversaw its construction, were naturally enmeshed in the slow stamping of both ‘modern’ ideas and ‘modern’ structures onto the Sindhi physical and cultural landscapes. It asserted that the Barrage could be symbolically interpreted by the saint in a different way to that presented in the official ceremony, but on the other hand, this suggested that the ability to actually construct it was reserved to the British-dominated ruling class, whose vision of a productive Sind would be made a reality through the proper application of scientific principles. The saint’s irrational, spiritual response to the fact of the Barrage represented precisely the culture which the project was credited with helping to reshape. The figure of the saint did not reappear in post-independence discussions of the Barrages— not surprising, given the departure of the majority of Sind’s Hindus at Partition. In fact, any question of ‘spirituality’ was submerged. Even the hotly-contested place of Islam in the Pakistani state went unmentioned.46 The article’s wry, implied dismissal of the saint’s way of engaging with the Barrage as a harbinger of change encapsulates the 45

Times of India, 12 December, 1932. See Andrew Wilder, ‘Islam and Political Legitimacy in Pakistan in Muhammad Aslam Syed (ed.), Islam and Democracy in Pakistan (Islamabad: National Institute of Historical and Cultural Research, 1995), pp. 38–40. 46

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equation of a spiritual/material binary with an Indian/European one, a phenomenon which underpinned much colonial epistemology. Indeed, the figure serves to emphasize the material nature of the construction which underlies the saint’s spiritual texture. The ‘rationality’ which the dismissal of the saint represents was subsequently carried smoothly into the post-Independence period, as the postcolonial state took up the colonial state’s rationalist claim to truth.47 As it did so, it maintained the distinction between the expertise reserved to those in government and the inferior knowledge of the population of Sind. By contrast, the question of ‘scientific agriculture’ was not merely a rhetorical device: during and after the Lloyd Barrage’s construction, the government put a good deal of effort into encouraging Sindhis towards this type of farming. An experimental farming station was established in 1925, and a government-sponsored team travelled the country and taught cultivators new methods. The Chief Agricultural Officer in Sind also issued public information pamphlets which advised farmers on the new conditions which would come into existence when the Barrage project was completed, and recommended the best ways to grow new crops.48 As we have seen, this emphasis on (British) engineering and scientific agriculture spoke to a powerful set of assumptions about what constituted good agriculture, and these same assumptions were then carried over into Pakistani discussions in almost identical language. The post-Independence governments in Pakistan issued a wealth of publications concerning the question of ‘national development’, and naturally the topic found regular discussion in contemporary newspapers. Now, the theme of ‘improving’ Sindhi agriculture through administrative and social reforms became much more pronounced. The social aspects of agricultural practice had been very important in the way that the Lloyd Barrage was presented, and to an extent this was reflected in the land allocation policies which the government adopted. The land allocation policies for the Lloyd Barrage had 47 This statement takes up Chatterjee’s argument that some nationalist thought in India took on Western claims to rationality as the truest form of knowledge. Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: a derivative discourse? (London: Zed Books, 1986), pp. 14–17. 48 Examples include, Leaflets for distribution in Sind, No. 31 (1023): Improved varieties of cotton recommended by the Department, and Agricultural Leaflet No. 30 (1st Edition August, 1933): The cultivation of rabi oil-seed crops in the barrage areas of Sind. Issued by the Government of Bombay Agricultural Department.

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some ‘pro-peasant’ elements, and Hugh Dow, the officer responsible for formulating this policy, warned his colleagues against allotting land to ‘landgrabbing big zamindars’.49 However, zamindars were still given very favourable terms for Lloyd Barrage land. As Ghulam Mohammad’s speech at the Kotri opening ceremony demonstrated, this became a much more important theme after Partition. After Independence, as we have seen, bureaucrats, politicians and the press often made much greater rhetorical play of the importance of helping the ‘common man’. For example, an article in Wealth in 1950 argued that: The Tenancy Act passed during the Budget Session this year has in a way liberated 25 lakhs of tillers of soil from the heartless exploitation of some seven thousand landlords. [. . .] Same [sic] policy will be followed in the Lower Sind Barrage area also. The allied problems of ‘jagirs’ and their abolition is also under consideration of the Government.50

Land reforms were painfully slow in coming and, when they did, had at best a limited impact.51 But the concept played an important part in defining what kind of nation-state the new Pakistan was to be. The Barrage-opening ceremonies weighed into the debate by typifying the materialist, secular discourses which surrounded public works development during the 1950s and 1960s, and the accompanying trope of the ‘common man’ as the heart of the nation. Of course, the question of land and agrarian culture was not confined to direct discussions of the Barrage. One public-information book, published by the Government of Sind while the Kotri Barrage was under construction, carried an article arguing that: ‘The people who

49

Untitled note by Hugh Dow, dated 16 March, 1926, paragrah 43. ‘Sind’s efforts to develop her agriculture and industry’, Wealth (Karachi), 13 August, 1950). Jagir landholdings were large areas on which the master did not pay land revenue to the government. The ‘problem’ of jagirs, the financial losses to the state which they represented, and the social and political strength they gave to the big landlords, had exercised Sind’s administrators ever since Napier’s conquest. The British in Sind had maintained the status of jagirs to a great degree, and did nothing significant to challenge their power. On jagirs and land tenure reform in British Sind, see David Cheesman, Landlord Power and Rural Indebtedness in Colonial Sind, 1865–1901 (Richmond: Curzon, 1997), Chapter 2. 51 Ayub Khan promulgated the West Pakistan Land Reforms Regulation No. 64 on 7 February, 1959, but it was fatally undermined by loopholes and by cooperation between landlords and the local revenue authorities, which had the responsibility for implementing the reforms. Ian Talbot, Pakistan: A Modern History (Lahore: Vanguard Books, 1999), pp. 165–166. 50

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work on the land are condemned by their inefficient methods, to a life of drudgery[,]’ and that the solution lay in partial mechanization of farming alongside land-tenure reforms.52 The new emphasis on land and social reform went deeper than the bureaucracy’s running battle with Sind’s landlord-dominated political classes, and fitted with the broad moralizing aspects of ‘nation-building’ which characterized early post-Independence discourse in Pakistan. The centrality of people—of the patriotic individual’s efforts and sacrifices—in these discussions would seem to oppose the centrality of engineering and materiality in British-era Lloyd Barrage discourses. Indeed, the officials and citizens who spoke and wrote about the Kotri and Gudu Barrages spoke to a sovereign nation-state rather than an imperial state. Accordingly, the later rhetoric stressed the Pakistani nation’s need for food to eat and to export, whereas Sukkur-era rhetoric had almost exclusively stressed the prosperity that the project would bring to Sind itself. But, even leaving aside the continued valorization of technology and engineering that can be seen regarding the Kotri and Gudu projects, this theme reiterates one of the foundational premises of the ideology expressed with relation to the Lloyd Barrage: namely, that Sindhi agriculture was fundamentally ‘backward’ and unproductive. The declaration that this should be changed was now made in the name of the nation, rather than in the interests of Sindhis, and Sindhi landlords were explicitly held culpable for the state of affairs. The imposition of this change on the population by the government, through large-scale irrigation projects which required the intensification of agriculture and the adoption of new farming techniques, was unerringly similar. Moreover, the changing regimes all exploited the idea that the construction of an irrigation project could fundamentally alter Sindhi society for the better. This very fact belied the continuation into post-Independence Pakistan of the British ruling class’s paternalist, autocratic response to the perceived need to raise food production and land revenue. The basic idea that the government had a right, and even a duty, to educate the cultivators in the ‘correct’ ways of farming appeared in 1962, the year that the Gudu Barrage became operational, as strongly as it had in 1932. According to a report in Dawn, the Chairman of the West Pakistan Agricultural Development Corporation:

52 ‘Sind Agriculture: its past present and future [sic]’ in n.a., Sind People and Progress (N.p.: Directorate of Information Sind, n.d., n.p. n.).

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[E]xhorted the cultivators and field workers to work in closest cooperation and make the development programme for the Gudu Barrage area a complete success. [. . .] The Corporation was now leading and co-ordinating all work connected with land development, colonisation, agricultural extension and intensification, cropping pattern and such other activities. Nevertheless, he added, only hard work on the part of everybody concerned and full utilisation of agricultural supplies like good seeds, fertilisers, credit facilities and improved implements could produce the necessary increase in acreage and production.53

Again, the material fact of the Barrage required technical and cultural changes in the way that cultivators operated and, again, the logic of the project’s execution—increased agricultural output, leading to increased prosperity for the province or nation—required the compliance of cultivators with an official-led vision of how agriculture should be practised. This continued the colonial discourse of the triumph of British scientific irrigation over the native cultivator’s techniques, with the independent state taking on the colonial state’s self-promoting ideological role. The implication that Pakistani agriculture needed to be fundamentally altered to overcome food shortages and political instability, and to contribute to Pakistan’s foreign exchange position, ran through the speeches and newspaper reports associated with the Kotri and Gudu Barrage ceremonies. Although the political context of these needs had changed since the 1930s, a direct discursive line can still be drawn between the ideas of ‘progress’ deployed in relation to the three projects. Moreover, the colonial and earlyindependent states followed near-identical trajectories in approaching the challenges faced by agriculture in an arid country. Throughout the period under discussion, the renovated irrigation systems— with the new Barrages as their symbolic, as well as technical, lynchpins—were made to stand for the virtually unquestioned idea of ‘progress’. The discourses which accompanied the Barrages’ openings allotted them political meaning: not just in the immediate politics of the respective eras, but also in the deeper structural control exercised by an elitist, paternalistic, bureaucratic administration with overwhelming military backing. Both states attempted to cast themselves in the role of champion of modernity, as against the perceived backwardness of Sindhi landowners and cultivators. The reservation of knowledge which was embedded in this discourse was, 53

‘Farmers asked to work hard’, Dawn, 22 December, 1967.

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of course, open to contestation, as Khuhro and Ghulam Mohammad’s attempts to ‘out-modern’ each other suggest. But the ceremonies demonstrated the durability and pervasiveness of an ideology which, rightly or wrongly, promoted national ‘progress’ as a scale on which technology-intensive irrigation projects ranked above the habits and attitudes of the majority of the population.

C Cambridge University Press 2010 Modern Asian Studies 45, 1 (2011) pp. 201–224.  doi:10.1017/S0026749X10000247 First published online 3 November 2010

Partition Narratives: Displaced trauma and culpability among British civil servants in 1940s Punjab CATHERINE COOM BS School of History, University of Leeds, Leeds, West Yorkshire, LS2 9JT Email: [email protected]

Abstract Grassroots accounts of the tragic events of partition are increasingly in the spotlight in studies of the transfer of power. This paper approaches the local perspective through the memories of British civil servants during their last few months in Punjab, assessing what these reflections suggest about the mentality of the departing ruling elite. The similarities between these recorded experiences suggest a process of coming to terms with grief and guilt for what they had witnessed through the creation of a narrative of transition from total power to total loss; a simplified imagery of a fully operational and peaceful pre-1947 Punjab descending with shocking suddenness into the violence of partition. This process of shaping memories not only offers an insight into the British civil servant’s need for self-affirmation and a reaffirming of their sense of personal as well as professional value, but also has a broader importance in understanding the mentality of a group of people at the heart of pre-partition Punjab, who were instrumental in defining the emerging independent nation.

Introduction Partition narratives recorded in the wake of the transition of power in 1947 envelop the period in terms of personal experience. Men and women who bore witness to the state change, and its accompanying violence, recorded their experiences in memoirs, often processing this information in such a way as to attempt to come to terms with the shock of what had happened, as well as potentially releasing their lingering feelings of guilt for their involvement. Recent scholarship has extended understanding of the change from being ‘subjects’ to ‘citizens’, and offers a more universal picture of what ‘transfer

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of power’ really meant for individuals.1 Although the emerging narratives are fragmented by the trauma of partition experiences, they nonetheless offer the historian an insight into the memorialization used within communities to come to terms with the grim events of the partition period. For one group, however, the historian’s image remains relatively faceless. Although the Indian Civil Service (ICS) warrants substantial coverage as a bureaucratic organization, and as a site for the examination of late colonial imperial mentalities,2 the personal face of individual administrators at district level has been surprisingly neglected around the specific period of independence and partition. Scholarship covering the early twentieth century puts a face to district administration, in terms of the male civil servants’ backgrounds and approaches on arrival in the subcontinent.3 As for the subjects of the colonial regime, however, the transfer of power in 1947 had more than a professional impact on its administrative officers. In tracing this, civil service memoirs are an invaluable resource,4 but one which inevitably presents a narrativization structured around the efforts of these men to cope with their experiences and adapt to dramatic change in their personal and professional lives. These narratives may in themselves offer the historian an understanding of partition exactly through how it is accounted: the silences and shapes of recounted memories offer the reader an insight into how the unspeakable is coded into individual narratives.5 The suffering 1

For example, Aparna Basu, ‘Uprooted Women: Partition of Punjab 1947’ in Ruth Roach Pierson and Nupur Chaudhuri (eds), Nation, Empire, Colony: Historicising Gender and Race, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), pp. 270–286; Urvashi Butalia, The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India (London: C. Hurst, 2000), pp. 285–288; Yasmin Khan, The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan (New Haven, Connecticut, London: Yale University Press, 2007), p. 9. 2 Philip Woodruff, The Men who Ruled India: The Guardians (London: J. Cape, 1954), p. 14. 3 Elizabeth Collingham, Imperial Bodies: The Physical Experience of the Raj, 1800–1947 (Cambridge: Polity, 2001), pp. 150–154; Clive Dewey, Anglo-Indian Attitudes: The Mind of the Indian Civil Service (London: Hambledon Press, 1993), pp. 12–13. 4 This piece of research uses a core of eight written memoirs from the India Office Collection in the British Library. These were collected in the 1960s and vary in length depending upon how many surviving diaries and papers the writers had to hand, from eight to over 100 pages. I have supplemented this group with several memoirs held in the Centre for South Asian Studies (CSAS) at Cambridge, as well as two collections of letters held in the British Library, but all are written by ICS men who joined the service in the 1920s and 1930s, and whose Indian careers were ended in the mid1940s. Only R. H. Belcher (IOL: MSS Eur F180/64) offers the waiver that his memoir is written entirely from memory due to his having no surviving diaries or letters. 5 Butalia, The Other Side of Silence, pp. 285–288.

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of British civil servants in this context is obviously not comparable with that of the people truly bound up in the violence and fate of the subcontinent, and rather is founded in feelings of guilt, abrupt discontinuity of professional and personal life, and the horror of the ambivalently placed witness. Although not really victims, these men are nonetheless an important voice to the cultural or social historian in the light of recent scholarship. Butalia’s approach is an enlightening one for the partition historian. When considering her research, she writes, and words are, after all, all we have. One of the things that I found in the course of my interviews and research was that people struggled to describe what they had been through at partition, and often ended by saying what they had seen was indescribable.6

Butalia wrestled in her account with the question of how far it was ethical to push interviewees to describe their experiences in detail, but also with this more fundamental truth about the history of trauma: for her subjects, it was not necessarily an unwillingness to discuss what had happened that held her back, but rather their inability to express a ‘true’ account. Instead what she consistently encountered were the rehearsed memorializations of people’s suffering: their accustomed recounting of trauma in words which shaped the memories they had chosen to retain. This is exemplified by the remarkably homogenous response elicited by questioning a Sikh community living in New Delhi about their female relatives’ deaths in 1947.7 Although in many cases it was the women’s own fathers, brothers and husbands who performed the killing for the sake of the women’s—and the community’s— honour, the memorialization of this event is consistently one that uses the terminology of the women having ‘martyred’ themselves.8 A similar phenomenon is noticeable in Ishtiaq Ahmed’s collection of first-hand accounts of forced migrants from Lahore, where the narratives are shaped strongly around an argument about who was at fault for the violence and thus focus in a disjointed way on particular details of their partition experience.9 As Butalia comments, 6

Ibid., p. 285. Ibid., p. 288. 8 Ibid., p. 288. 9 Ishtiaq Ahmed, ‘Forced Migration and Ethnic Cleansing in Lahore in 1947: Some First Person Accounts’ in Ian Talbot and Shinder Thandi (eds), People on the Move: Punjabi Colonial, and Post-Colonial Migration (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 96–141. 7

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‘for the community of survivors, the remembrance ritual works at many levels. It helps keep the memory alive, and at the same time it helps them forget. They remember, selectively, in order to forget’.10 Another effect of these practised narratives is highlighted by Ananya Kabir.11 Commenting on survivor testimonies, she writes ‘the quasiastrological language emphasizes the inexplicability of the events leading up to Partition, while exonerating “the masses” from the mutual violence which accompanied it’.12 This effect in first-hand accounts is also one that Ian Talbot notes in the historiography, observing, official histories have made the violence ‘non-narratable’. They have achieved this by firstly reducing it to a ‘local’ detail that is irrelevant to the wider event of national independence and secondly by portraying it as an aberration, arising from a temporary moment of madness that does not require rational explanation.13

The fundamental question, here, is to what extent we can really know an event like partition. Where personal destruction and loss is so widespread in a historical event, is it actually possible to reach any real ‘account’ or ‘truth’? Butalia’s approach to this issue is not as in dealing with a problem, but rather as an enrichment of what the book is able to offer: when using these memorializations, presented by the subject, it is in their silences that her material is richest. For the historian of partition then, the way in which memories are recorded and communicated is perhaps the most significant part of the story. Partition cannot be recounted as a dry series of events when considered at a personal level, but rather than this being a weakness of the subject’s discussion, it is in these limitations of the sources that their value lies. What civil servants chose to remember and record—and what they chose not to—narrates the experience of tragedy. The very way in which the life-changing events are written is a process in coming to terms with them, and representing the past so as to understand its impact upon personal life and identity. Whilst these sources have tended to be considered as ‘official’ or ‘distanced’ 10

Ibid., p. 288. Ananya Kabir, ‘Subjectivities, Memories, Loss: Of Pigskin Bags, Silver Spittoons and the Partition of India’, Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, vol. 4, no. 2 (2002), pp. 245–264. 12 Ibid., p. 248. 13 Ian Talbot, ‘The 1947 Violence in the Punjab’ in Ian Talbot (ed.), The Deadly Embrace: Religion, Politics and Violence in India and Pakistan 1947–2002 (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 1. 11

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accounts, they are in fact just as personal as Indian ones in many important respects. The nature of source material available to consider the British perspective is such that a reading of how collective memory has evolved is perhaps the most valid response to previous approaches. The Raj fervour material of the 1980s—Charles Allen’s Plain Tales books, Kipling and The Jewel in the Crown—offer the most pervasive public imagery of the working empire.14 This romanticization of Raj culture has acted as a public backdrop to the development of critical analysis of Anglo-Indian society,15 as offered in the work of Cohn, Collingham and Dewey.16 The memoirs on which romanticized Raj writing have been based, however, remain a valuable and relatively untapped analytic source in considering local memories of state transformation. What perhaps comes across as a weakness of memoir sources from coffee table accounts and popular history, is equally suffused with the capability of shedding light on how civil servants interpreted and committed to memory their role in the disintegrating local state. By considering the way in which these men memorialized their experiences, these sources can be used to provide a new angle on the Punjabi partition and transfer of power. In doing so, the memoirs of district officers may be fitted into the wider historiography of Anglo-India, and also in the wider historiography of partition and the postcolonial state. In particular, this paper seeks to demonstrate how the importance of prestige and the performative state, as represented by Cohn, was described as operating at the point of crisis, the transition from acting out ‘Britishness’ and the prestige of rule, to leaving one’s district.17 In these men’s representations lies an intimate angle on the local state’s operation in its final months. As a result, it is possible to discover from the limitations of the testimonies and from the narratives adopted, what ‘transfer of power’ meant to district officers in terms of their loss of status, disillusionment with the changes to a status quo in which they had more than a professional investment, and 14 Charles Allen, Plain Tales from the Raj and Tales from the Dark Continent (London: Century Publishing, 1985), pp. 21–264; Paul Scott, The Raj Quartet (New York; London: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), pp. 1–464. 15 The term Anglo-Indian is used here in its nineteenth-century sense, to indicate the British community in India. 16 Bernard S. Cohn, Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1996), pp. 4–10; Collingham, Imperial Bodies, pp. 5–6; Dewey, Anglo-Indian Attitudes, pp. 3–7. 17 Cohn, Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge, p. 3.

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the unspoken pain of experiencing violence from a position of altered status. Although planned for and anticipated, the transfer of power to India and the new state of Pakistan in August 1947 occurred sooner, quicker and with an accompanying violence for which many in the ICS, like all other Punjabis, had not felt prepared. In the Punjab, the breakdown of state control into violence was shocking and frustrating for the men whose professional lives had been spent in maintaining the status quo, and the partition a failure of everything which the administration had sought to achieve. This paper will focus on the experiences of British civil servants in the transfer period of 1946–1947 to assess the attitude of those involved at the local level to the British withdrawal from northern India. The men considered all worked as district officers in the Punjab in the closing years of British control of the province, and had not only an intimate role in the years preceding partition but a local view of the changes taking place in 1947. Their memoirs offer an insight into their memories and reflections of 1940s colonial Punjab, which provides a vital link in understanding the reality of the transfer of power, how it was achieved, what ‘transfer’ and ‘loss’ of power really meant in this context, and above all what official mentality survived at the local level at this stage. In breaking down these categories, this paper will look at three key areas. First, the fundamental alteration in British experience of 1946– 1947 lay in the perceived change from omnipotence within the district to being rendered relatively powerless. The increasing awareness of their limitations will be charted through the records of several memoirs, as the basis of the transition in attitudes which underlay the national changes of independence and partition. The second section will focus on incidents of communal violence. The memoirs paint a uniform image of a communally peaceable wartime Punjab, with 1946–1947 marking a striking change in local relations between the religious communities. The reliability of this narrative of sudden communal breakdown will be considered, and the case examined alongside other accounts of communalism in 1940s Punjab.18 Descriptions of violence will be isolated as case studies of the state role and its power at the point of transition. Finally, the 18 The reference to episodes of ‘communalism’ in this paper indicate incidents that were labelled or considered as such by the civil servants involved, using their characterization as part of the analysis of their representation rather than engaging with the communalism debate specifically.

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question of what the transfer of power realistically meant will be considered, who was in power at each point in time, how much control they were actually able to exercise, and what ‘the state’ meant at local level during the transition between 1946–1947.

The ‘loss’ of power The province of Punjab had a history of unrivalled status in British India, created by a British colonial discourse but in constant interaction with elements accepted or imposed by Indian conceptions of the discourse of rule.19 Loyal during the 1857 mutiny, the province became the core recruiting ground for the British Indian army. By the end of World War I, Punjabis had made up 400,000 of the 563,091strong Indian army,20 and in 1939, the Unionist Government again declared their willingness to cooperate with the war effort.21 The late nineteenth-century racial imagery invoked to describe and justify this special status of Punjabis lent the province a mythic martialism and wildness, which in turn gave particular prestige to the ICS men administrating there. Those probationers accepted into the Punjabi branch of the ICS were considered an elite, the best candidates of their generation.22 The service as a whole offered substantial responsibility at a young age, with huge districts under an individual civil servant’s command, and Punjab in particular was famed for the independence of its men,23 a reputation implicit in the self-representation offered in these men’s memoirs. Even as the service faced the imminent reality of independence and concomitant necessity of modernization in the 1920s and 1930s, Punjab’s mythic status at least was of a province and an administration untamed, where civilians roamed huge distances on horseback and dispensed justice under the shade of village trees. The imagery is not unimportant, even for aspiring civilians joining the 19

Cohn, Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge, pp. 113–117. Dewitt C. Ellinwood Junior, ‘An Historical Study of the Punjabi Soldier in World War I’ in Harbans Singh and N. Gerald Barner (eds), Punjab Past and Present: Essays in Honour of Dr Ganda Singh (Patiala: Punjabi University, 1976), p. 340. 21 London, British Library, Asia, Pacific and African Collections, ‘Indian Civil Service District Officer Recollections’, by A. A. Williams, Punjab 1932–1947, MSS Eur F180/70, p. 10: ‘In the Rawalpindi countryside, the tradition of military service was strong; military pensions from World War I amounted to about six times the land revenue; and this new war brought many men flocking to enlist.’ 22 Dewey, Anglo-Indian Attitudes, pp. 1–8. 23 Ibid., p. 201. 20

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Punjabi service in the 1930s and 1940s. Recognizing the principle of the transfer of power did not lead to a pragmatic recognition of its imminence, and traditionalism remained dominant in shaping probationers’ expectations of the service they joined. Naturally, this could perhaps be seen as a fragile defensiveness of the status quo, but ties as much into the sense of inertia created by a strong structural esprit de corps in the style of administration. As one of the two provinces divided between India and Pakistan at independence, the religious constitution of Punjab was naturally a vital element of its external reputation and the internal experience of British civil servants.24 Most significant in the development of the British officers’ partition narratives, however, is the fact that the religious heterogeneity was spanned by a capacity for political unity right up to the early 1940s. The mixture of religious communities in Punjab created a stronger sense of fitting into a regional identity than a religiously structured one, and this powerful Punjabi identity impressed upon British administrators as well, to the extent that they felt in their post-1947 lives that a ‘Punjabi’ identity was still important to them. The unique social composition of Punjab was expressed politically in its successful Unionist party, and the stability of this coalition is attributed throughout the memoirs to the leadership of Sir Sikander Hyat Khan. However, the pragmatic position of the Unionist party due to its British support was also significant to its enduring power into the 1940s.25 The event of Sir Sikander’s death in 1942 is highlighted in the memoirs of almost all Punjabi AngloIndians as the turning point in communal relations, with the regime 24 For more detail, see: Ian Talbot, Freedom’s Cry: The Popular Dimension in the Pakistan Movement and Partition Experience in North-West India (Karachi; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). pp. 3–5; Ian Talbot, Punjab and the Raj 1849–1947 (New Delhi: Manohar Publications, 1988), pp. 18–34; Roger Ballard, ‘Panth Kismet Dharm te Kaum: Continuity and Change in Four Dimensions of Punjabi Religion’ in Pritam Singh and Shinder S. Thandi (eds), Globalisation and the Region: Explorations in Punjabi Identity (Coventry: Association for Punjab Studies (UK), 1996), p. 15. 25 The investment in canal colonies in early twentieth-century Punjab perpetuated the British ability to hand out political favours in the form of fertile land. The importance of Punjab as India’s bread-basket both enforced the necessity of political stability and perpetuated the power of landowning, thus retaining the political status quo. Talbot, Punjab and the Raj, p. 106: ‘the Unionist leaders certainly believed that they need not engage in electioneering in the same way as their rivals. The natural leadership of the landlords and Pirs in the countryside would ensure the party’s success. They would act as brokers in the localities, mobilising their kinsmen, murids and clients to vote for the Unionist Party in return for its promise of access to Government patronage’.

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under his influence being a genuinely unified and settled one, and the rising status of Jinnah’s Muslim League as the destabilizing factor. These circumstances, then—or certainly the impression of them accepted and represented by British civil servants—create the sense of suddenness with which Punjabi stability was seen to decline into the violent tragedy of partition, and the concomitant difficulty all those involved had in coming to terms with the events. The idea of Punjab as a stable and well-integrated society prior to the events of the mid-1940s is conveyed similarly in partition memories collected by Ishtiaq Ahmed and Urvashi Butalia.26 Although questioning their complacency in retrospect as they consider the relationships between different religious groups, several of these interviewees talk about inter-religious friendships, and successful communities right up to the last months before partition.27 In the old days it had been normal in times of trouble to take stern action against village officials, arms licensees and the like who did not cooperate. This was effective because nobody wanted to lose his privileges. Once the date had been fixed for the departure of the British, privileges held under British rule ceased to mean anything. Nobody in his senses was going to give useful information to help maintain law and order if by doing so he might incur the displeasure of the future rulers of the country. Even so most of these privilege-holders hated what was happening and were ready to help if they could do so on the quiet. It had become useless to be stern; the only possible technique was to be constantly on the move so as to see them as often as possible.28

These are the words of a district officer, Patrick Brendon, working in Gurgaon in 1947, demonstrating the very real loss of power these men felt, having been accustomed to a remit prior to 1946 that allowed them to influence huge swathes of the Indian population with the practised distribution and control of ‘privileges’. In the wellrecognized ‘transfer of power’ it is equally important to observe the loss of power experienced by the colonial generation and the dissipation of control within the local administration. Brendon recognizes the experienced simplicity of the system as it broke down in a comment about the increasing tension of the 1940s, writing how much he came to ‘admire the men of the Victorian age who had built the machine 26 Ahmed, ‘Forced Migration and Ethnic Cleansing in Lahore in 1947’, p. 111; Butalia, The Other Side of Silence, pp. 285–288. 27 Ibid., 28 Cambridge, CSAS, Brendon Collection, Memoir ‘Disaster in Gurgaon’, Small Collections Box 5, p. 51.

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so well that it continued to function, however haltingly, despite the strains of the 1940s’.29 In this interpretation, the period highlighted the ease with which young British probationers had been able to join the administration of a country so foreign to them, adopting a power they took for granted, within only a few months. Brendon’s comment recognizes an administrative ‘machine’, a system one slipped into as a new arrival, and yet the ability to control that he notices the loss of is based not so much in a ‘machine’, but in the sense of recognition and acceptance as a purveyor of power. Indeed, in entering the ICS, one’s ready acceptance as a ruler relied upon the adoption of a learnt prestige:30 the imagery of power practised by the British in India. In fitting himself into a ‘system of control’ linked back to the late Victorian Raj, Brendon narrativizes an image of partition here as the end-point for an overarching colonial project, his mentality being that of the beneficiary of generations of British rulers, faced with more challenging times. The narrative constructed is one of the ICS esprit de corps on a grand scale, with successive generations pursuing the same beneficent colonial project with an inertia that belies the reality of early twentieth-century northern India. The acceptance of norms of performative behaviour comes across in many accounts of the early years of service. John Martin Fearn, a Punjabi probationer in 1940, commented that it said much of the service that ‘the young ICS entry was cheerfully acknowledged as the senior officer of the not too distant future’.31 This quick assumption of responsibility and status was not only a reflection on the personalities of Fearn’s colleagues. Rather, the nature of the service—its size in relation to the vast population it served, the impossibility of the bureaucratic endeavour to ‘know’ everything occurring in a district— necessitated an approach which relied on imagery of power at all times, and action wherever possible. The British population of India was minute throughout the period of colonial rule, dictating the style of control possible. For the new white man in the Punjab, adopting

29

Cambridge, CSAS, Brendon, p. 4. That is to say, the hierarchical structure of Anglo-Indian society, in which professional and social status were intertwined, enforced behavioural norms which reflected both an Anglo-Indian conception of ‘Britishness’ and an Indian pressure in terms of how they expected a ruler to act. 31 London, British Library, Asia, Pacific and African Collections, ‘Memoirs of John Martin Fearn, C.B., Indian Civil Service (Punjab) 1940–1947’, MSS Eur F180/67, p. 2. 30

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the actions of a prestigious service—the ‘heaven born’32 —was the essence of rule, not only for himself but for the entire community. Without prestige, it had nothing, as the white population was militarily insignificant. The key to the local pre-1947 state lay in its performance of power,33 the injection of as little action as possible, used in the most visible way. As Orwell’s 1936 essay, ‘Shooting an Elephant’, characterizes, it is the condition of his rule that he shall spend his life in trying to impress the ‘natives’, and so in every crisis he has got to do what the ‘natives’ expect of him. He wears a mask and his face grows to fit it. . . . A sahib has got to act like a sahib; he has got to appear resolute, to know his own mind and do definite things. . .my whole life, every white man’s life in the East, was one long struggle not to be laughed at.34

The pressure on this acting out of the power relationship in accordance with the expectations of the local audience naturally increased from the 1920s, as the memoirs of district officers reflect. Sir Conrad Corfield arrived in the Punjab in 1920, in the aftermath of the Jallianwallah Bagh massacre, and was witness very quickly to both protests and the ICS’s approach to them. Within a few months of his arrival, he watched his District Commissioner cope with a crowd chanting ‘Gandhiji Ki Jai’ (long live Gandhi) with the use of his presence alone.35 Corfield recalls, as soon as the tail of the procession had passed, the D.C. descended into the street and walked slowly towards the massed throng. He gazed thoughtfully from face to face of its leaders, as though to mark well the features of each and bear them in mind. No word was spoken as he stood alone in the middle of the street under the hissing paraffin lamps, contemplating those who defied the Raj. One by one the crowd began to melt, until only a sprinkling of onlookers remained. They all salaamed as we stepped into the waiting car.36

Corfield was working in the princely states as political agent by 1946 so does not contrast this experience with those of a district officer at the point of transfer, and yet, writing in the 1960s, his 32

Allen, Plain Tales, p. 45. Thomas Blom Hansen and Finn Stepputat, ‘Introduction: States of Imagination’ in Thomas Blom Hansen and Finn Stepputat (eds), States of Imagination: Ethnographic Explorations of the Postcolonial State (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2001), pp. 6–7. 34 George Orwell, ‘Shooting an Elephant’ in his Collected Essays (London: Secker and Warburg, 1961), pp. 19–20. 35 Cambridge, C SAS, Corfield Papers, Box I, p. 16. 36 Ibid., p. 16. 33

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memory of the performance in action prompts a teleological reflection. He asks, ‘personality and prestige had won the day, but how long could it succeed against those who seemed more interested in securing power than maintaining peace?’37 The significance of this act lay in its potential emptiness and the realization underlying this comment that prestige could not be backed by an equal display of military force, both for moral and pragmatic reasons. The performance could only last as long as it reflected central political power: once realization of Indian independence was imminent, prestige lost its potency. Thus to return to Brendon’s account of 1947, on 20th February H.M.G. announced that British rule in India would come to an end by 30th June 1948 at the latest. This was followed by Khizr Hyat’s decision not to remain in office in the face of Muslim League opposition. Congress ceased to be a government party and was therefore no longer interested in maintaining the peace of the District. Everyone began to look ahead to the day when the British would go.38

In the transfer of power in Delhi in 1947, lay a fundamental loss for district officers. Not only was a date set for the actual loss of control, in reality the foundation of local power in its performance was automatically undermined. Having said this, the prestige of a white face, and the potent cultural trappings associated with it, did not lose status altogether. Thus the position of the British ICS officer in 1946– 1947 was an ambivalent one. R. H. Belcher, who stayed in Multan until September 1947, recalls seeing horrific evidence of violence and yet feeling no fear for himself. He writes of an incident where he had to scare off a raiding party from a passing train, that was the only time I ever used, or carried, a gun during my whole time in India. Throughout those weeks of terrible disorder and bloodshed I had no need to feel any anxiety for my own safety; a white skin was a passport to free, and indeed welcome passage through the most menacing communal groups.39

Although the significance of British prestige had evaporated overnight, its embedded cultural meaning was retained, leaving British men in the Punjab with a position of being separated from the violence because of the remainder of their racially-marked status, 37

Ibid., p. 16. Cambridge, CSAS, Brendon, p. 24. 39 London, BL, APAC, ‘Recollections of the Indian Civil Service: Punjab 1939– 1947’, by R. H. Belcher, MSS Eur F180/64, p. 89. 38

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without the power to act to stop it. There is a sense in these narrativizations of the need to justify a feeling of helplessness of local responsibility without the central backing to enact power in the only way the ICS had ever really known, and yet, it was not really powerlessness that these civil servants experienced in 1947. Rather, the evidence of the continued impact of whiteness suggests a shift of control, no longer held as extensively in the hands of British civil servants, but not so completely removed as to make these men feel absolved of the guilt of having witnessed massacres in which their ability to intervene was compromised. The narrative that produces an image of the transition from total power to total powerlessness is a deceptive one, a creation of men who knew themselves to represent something more than their individual status. Like Brendon’s recourse to the Victorian image in which he cast himself, these men’s efforts to draw a sharp contrast between pre-1947 and the year itself offers self-validation through support of the system of rule. By narrating an experience of the system ‘at work’ right up to the decision to depart and divide in 1947, followed by a sudden and complete loss of control, the men are able to negate their personal feelings of guilt concomitantly with a resounding tribute to the values and effectiveness of a colonial ideology they represent as uniformly effective prior to the final collapse.

Witnessing violence The narrative that defines the events of 1946–1947 as unprecedented and shocking is the most striking element of the British ICS memoirs. Consistently, the wartime atmosphere of the Punjab is described as peaceful and cooperative, with incidents of communal tension only occasionally warranting a mention. For instance, despite the immediacy of independence, Brendon describes Gurgaon in late 1946 and early 1947, as peaceful as I had ever known it in India. Everyone was prosperous after a series of good harvests; crime was under control; there were no agitations or movements; the district staff was free of any serious scandals.40

His experience after the announcement of British withdrawal was, as described above, one of powerlessness and violence, and yet the general perception in the British community still struggled to adapt 40

Cambridge, CSAS, Brendon, p. 22.

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to this sudden change in the status quo. Brendon recalls a visit to Delhi: [A]s I left Toam I could see ugly columns of smoke rising from Hindu villages which the Meos were burning in a counter-offensive. I went on to see my wife and child at the Willingdon nursing home. I was very dirty and everyone there looked more than a little perplexed. New Delhi had not by then adjusted itself to communal fighting.41

This narrative of the breakdown into communal violence thus represents Punjab as a region previously untouched by the degree of political activity and rioting seen elsewhere. It creates an image, common to all the memoirs of district officers, of a situation in 1947 which was wholly unprecedented, a colonial status quo only really shaken following the announcement of the British departure in February 1947. This representation of Punjab as communally stable, and of the partition violence as wholly without foundation in the wartime years, is similar to that of Indian and Pakistani interview subjects. The narrative produced in both cases suggests the unpredictability of violence in 1946–1947 by not portraying any development of tensions during the 1940s. What is emphasized, though, is how cooperative inter-religious relations were previously, and how shocking the violence was as a result. Punjab was certainly unusual in its level of stability during wartime, as evidenced by the cooperation of the province’s Unionist government and the high proportion of Punjabis committed to the war effort. However, the narrative of a peaceful Punjab interrupted by unpredictable—and thus uncontrollable— violence, has an important corollary effect. As suggested in the previous section, the loss of the power behind the prestige of ‘whiteness’ left District Commissioners limited in their ability to prevent violence and loss of life in the areas which had so recently been under their control. Along with the tremendous power of the District Commissioner-role in the Punjab had come a heavy weight of responsibility, a responsibility that these men felt at this stage they were no longer able to dispense. In affirming the value of the role to which they had given so many years of professional and personal life, the imagery and values of the colonial state became even more important in retrospect. Describing in their memoirs a colonial institution that weathered the storms and operated with a real level of 41

Ibid., p. 30.

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control over its subjects concomitantly validated the careers which had dominated these men’s lives, and indeed formed the basis of their adult identity. The investment in positively representing the colonial past offered an immediate effect in supporting the self-worth of individuals, but also left a broader inheritance of collective memorializing of the colonial way of life. This feeling of personal grief, mingled with anger at the loss of status, and the fact that there was no longer a need for the career in which they had spent their lives to date, is transmitted in many of the accounts in condemnation of political change and the move to democracy: the Labour Government no doubt regarded the quitting of India as a great act of statesmanship. Others may have shared this view; it all depends on one’s standpoint and perspective. To one Punjab officer at least it appeared as an act of betrayal and even cowardice; one does not leave in the lurch and to bloody slaughter people who had trusted in one’s will and ability to protect them. Much fine talk is made of the recognition of rights, of self determination and of the evils of autocratic and alien rule, but when responsibilities for life and welfare have been assumed and exercised over a long period of years it is futile and irrelevant to harp on the rights and wrongs of that assumption, and the responsibilities become a trust not to be discarded unless there is a successor at least as well able to maintain it.42

Belcher’s memories also reflect this sense of betraying people who had placed trust in his ability to retain the status quo. He wrote in his memoir about a meeting with a group of tribal leaders during a tour made in April or May, 1947.43 This group had received recognition from the colonial government and thus expressed to him their concerns about what status they could expect to hold in the postcolonial regime. He wrote, the tears they shed in front of me were genuine; and I felt the lameness of my answers in justifying the decisions that had been taken, although I believed them to be right and inevitable. These people and their anxieties were now, however, of less immediate importance for the maintenance of peace and order than the Civil Services and the Army, whose effectiveness and whose loyalties began now to be in doubt either from their anxieties about their

42

London, BL, APAC, Williams, p. 21. In introducing his memoir, Belcher quite frankly states that the account is written from memory due to his having no surviving diary or letter material. Thus the memories he records are those that stayed with him as striking, and are not firmly attached to the date they occurred. 43

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future or, as the news multiplied of communal outbreaks, from passionate feelings of communal bitterness.44

These descriptions, focused on a sense that they were betraying people who would prefer them to have stayed, again validates the system and the job that these men had done. The undesirability of change for the departing civil servants is blown up in these accounts into a representation that what followed the Raj period could not be desirable for the communities they had previously administered. A notable exception to the narrative of peace descending suddenly and unexpectedly into communal violence is found in the memoirs of Sir James Penny, who retired in 1945 from a senior position in the Secretariat. Not involved in the upheaval of independence and partition, he recalls his memories of wartime demonstrations in intricate detail as the most violent experiences for which he felt some sense of responsibility and involvement. Returning from leave in November 1939, he observed the marching and drilling of organizations like the Khaksars and Hindu Mahants, and worked closely with Sir Sikander Hyat Khan in putting down the violence.45 He wrote in his memoir, each community saw in these armies a way of showing its strength and working up the enthusiasm of its followers. Early in 1940 it became clear that there was nothing for it but to grasp the nettle. Processions had been prohibited in Lahore, but the Khaksars announced their intention of marching through the city. Sikander was in a difficult position. He was naturally reluctant to antagonise his co-religionists, and after all as a politician he depended on Muslim votes. He asked me if I thought we ought to put our foot down and stop the march. I said we ought. If we let it pass we would only have to take on the Sikhs next.46

This decision required his support for an armed response, which resulted in the death of four policemen and 31 Khaksars, following which the Defence of India rules were used to ban the Khaksar organization.47 The severity of this experience, in the absence of personal contact with partition violence, leads Penny to justify his own decisions, and revisit a shocking and memorable chapter of his career. For others who stayed on, the absence of similar accounts perhaps reflects the extent to which, like Butalia’s subjects, they found the 44 45 46 47

London, BL, APAC, Belcher, pp. 74–75. Cambridge, CSAS, Penny Papers, Box I, pp. 185–190. Ibid., pp. 190–192. Ibid., p. 192.

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brutality of 1947 experiences ‘indescribable’.48 In comparison, the exercise of police control over demonstrations during wartime is thus insignificant enough to warrant no mention in memoir narrativizations of the 1940s.

Interrogating the transfer of power The reality of the transfer of power at district level appears from British civil servants’ memoirs as essentially a power vacuum. For the district commissioners ‘handing over’, the experience is described in several cases as one of having no one to hand over to. In the partitioned Punjab, Sikh and Hindu ICS men left West Punjab, and Muslim administrators left their posts in East Punjab in the nervous months before 14 August, in order to be on the ‘right side’ of the partition line once it was announced after the date of independence. This meant British officers continued to hold the reins during the summer months until Sikh and Hindu men could arrive in East Punjabi districts, and Muslims in the West. The extent of the violence delayed this arrival and extended the period of British ambivalent custodianship. Thus as Belcher describes, working in Multan in 1947, ‘on August 15th , no permanent incumbent having yet been appointed to the Commissionership, I myself raised the Pakistan flag with appropriate ceremony on the Commissioner’s office and residence’.49 Recalling the chaos he was witness to following the independence date, Belcher adds, in the West Punjab this terrifying storm of bloodshed and disorder burst on a critically weakened administration. Almost all the British I.C.S. officers had left at Independence, as had. . .all the non-Muslim senior Indian officers, so that a number of districts were in the hands of relatively inexperienced men, some only recently appointed to them.50

Uncomfortably cognisant of his own limited influence, Belcher was thus nonetheless aware of the absence and inexperience of incoming administrators. His account demonstrates the extent to which the independence and partition of Punjab produced a loss of power by the retreating government and its officers, but also the attitude this 48 49 50

Butalia, The Other Side of Silence, p. 285. London, BL, APAC, Belcher, p. 79. Ibid., p. 81.

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produced. For the British men leaving in 1947, the situation they had observed at the point of departure appeared to offer little hope of success for the two new independent states. At the local level, the weaknesses of an inexperienced and scattered replacement staff left an impression among the British officials that their handover could lead only to collapse and loss of the embedded administrative norms of the pre-1947 era.51 A. A. Williams’ memories of his last months in Amritsar give a similar impression of the hollowness of administrative efforts against a backdrop of bloodshed. Following an intense period of arson and looting in June 1947, a 48-hour curfew was imposed and Williams toured the charred remains of the city’s buildings. He writes, ‘an Emergency Act was prepared and promulgated, but it could be little more than a paper exercise to try and deal with the immense human and financial problem in the dying days of the province’.52 Police work also continued, and Williams recalls the sense of insufficiency he felt in trying to bring murder cases to trial: the petitioners—for whom there was almost invariably nothing to be said— could perhaps feel unjustly treated; the thousands of mass murderers of the troubles could never properly be brought to book; and even when one could be caught red-handed it was not unknown for him to be released on bail at once by a coreligionist on the judiciary bench.53

This case demonstrates how power at the local level had slipped out of the hands of ICS men. The construction in their narratives of partition of an image of a power vacuum following total control of their district belies the fact that with such limited manpower, it was never possible for a district officer to really take everything into his own hands. Rather, the displacement of power from ICS hands during 1947 was an extension of previous limitations on their ability to control their districts. In the judicial context, the provision of false witnesses and reliance on local clerks were just two elements of the process in which control of the outcome of cases had always been displaced from the supposed head of proceedings. In Williams’ comment, he remembers frustration at verdicts going against his control, but the representation of this as a phenomenon contained within the final 51 Thus there was lasting doubt expressed in these men’s later reflections about the long-term potential of India and Pakistan as independent states, despite the extent to which ICS practices and structure were retained by the Indian Administrative Service. 52 London, BL, APAC, Williams, pp. 19–20. 53 Ibid., p. 20.

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years of British rule is misleading. What for these men was a loss of power was in reality a displacement which added further to existing structures of local control, and the representation offers an insight into the narrative the men involved wished to construct about their ability to rule pre-1947. Recording this as a dichotomy of power and powerlessness operates as a justification of a system which had worked well prior to the 1940s and collapsing only at this point, but British colonial power was never total, just as 1947 was not in reality a power vacuum. The power transfer in district administration in 1947 impacts upon memoirs of the British civil servants present in several ways. Naturally, the limited number of men involved in maintaining government activities in this period creates a pragmatic issue in ‘knowing’ partition. At the height of state change, the state had so little manpower effectively deployed that only a few memories survive. The experience of being the final remnant of the British cadre left in the Punjab also shapes the nature of the memories related. There is a strong theme running through these remaining memoirs of abandonment by central government, both in Delhi and at the centre of Empire, in London. For these men, a strong narrative of central abdication of what they saw as responsibilities to which they had given their lives provides an interpretation which separates them from responsibility for the massacres of partition, and equally distracts from any idea of a weakening colonial state previous to 1947. Belcher’s memoir exemplifies this description of apparent divorce between centre and district and the necessity of managing without communication links: The slide into general disorder was rapid as the rumours or harder news grew of the murderous attacks on Muslims in East Punjab; our constant efforts to prevent retaliatory attacks on our non-Muslims were only partly and patchily successful. It soon became apparent that one’s authority in such matters, even with direct subordinates, could only be relied upon to run as far as one’s eye could see. Communications and personal mobility were therefore a more than usually vital necessity, but both soon became a serious problem. The posts, telegraphs and telephones were an early casualty either through the cutting of wires or the disappearance of staff.54

The sense of abandonment expressed by the British ICS men who stayed in Punjab during the summer of 1947 was thus a dual effect: partly, with staff lost from every level of administration, the 54

London, BL, APAC, Belcher, pp. 81–89.

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infrastructure of rule was on hold, leaving civil servants dealing with the most serious events of their careers in the subcontinent with limitations on their capacity for control; but equally, this representation was valuable in negating individual and collective failure in empire. This period leaves a legacy of guilt and frustration throughout ICS memoirs: against the incursion of democracy, the inadequacy of the arrangements for transfer of power, the weakness of their own position in the last years of British rule, and the divorce of central government decision-making from district tensions. Slater recalls his family’s departure with the words ‘it should have been a moving occasion, but I was almost beyond caring’.55 Sir Conrad Corfield similarly detached himself from government plans for the subcontinent in which he felt he could have no part. Leaving Punjab in July 1947, he recorded, ‘I boarded the plane at Karachi with a feeling of nausea, as though my own honour had been smirched and I had deserted my friends’.56 The embodiment of colonial values, coupled with his lifelong service in the Punjab, made the breakdown of the state in these final months too traumatising to witness. The best he could hope for was that British efforts in India had not ‘been quite wasted’.57 For Corfield, leaving India to ‘democracy’ meant abandoning the country to a complete absence of control in the districts and a failure of centre-periphery communications amidst communal rioting. The contrast for these men was between what they had experienced and now narrativized as a secure paternalistic government, and the situation in which they left Punjab in mid-1947 amidst violence and chaos, where no voice of state control was active. The previous model not only appeared the most suitable in retrospect, but was a style of rule in which these men had invested a belief: for them, the paternalistic system was the one which worked for India, and the concept of the new nation adopting the Westminster model of governance simply did not fit in with their ideas about India and Indians. In consequence, their predictions for postcolonial India and Pakistan were uniformly pessimistic. Belcher comments on the ‘great relief I felt at the time when my service came to an end’, recalling ‘I felt acutely the sense of futility and despair over the division of the Punjab at partition and its tragic 55 London, British Library, Asia, Pacific and African Collections, ‘District Officer’s Memoirs: R. M. K. Slater, Punjab Commission 1939–1947’, MSS Eur F180/69, p. 32. 56 Cambridge, CSAS, Corfield, p. 162. 57 Ibid., p. 167.

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consequences—and the ineffectual part it fell to me to play in those grim days’.58 Democracy and independence meant both a loss of personal status and value, and a collapse of the system in which those involved in empire had to some extent an emotional and practical investment. These reflections are layered with a sense of personal responsibility. The frustration of not being able to act for the general good at this stage in their careers gave ICS men an overarching feeling of the futility of their efforts, not only in 1947 when their hands were tied by the breakdown of the administration but more generally in terms of their legacy of achievements in the Punjab. The fruits of democracy were referred to with cynicism as bitter in comparison with the benefits of a benevolent and stable paternalistic state, such as that maintained by the British administration. There is no recognition in these accounts of the fact that the ‘steel frame’ of that administration survived the British civil servants’ departure, with the Indian Administrative Service and the remaining Indian and Pakistani officers continuing many of the pre-1947 practices in the newly independent states. The criticisms these men aimed at central government in the wake of their departure from the subcontinent partly reflect an effort to come to terms with their own role in the transfer of power. The image constructed of these months for those who worked up to the partition date was of a crippling power vacuum within which little administrative action was possible, and the retention of ICS practices and values appeared unlikely. The personal impact of extricating oneself from a situation where state control was to a large extent suspended is apparent in the juxtaposition in these memoirs of fond memorializations of a pre-1946 Punjabi idyll and a post-partition imagery of foreignness and futility in a region once felt almost to be ‘home’. Conclusion This paper has considered three aspects of the British ICS experience of partition in Punjab to shed light on the mentality of these men in the process of state change. Approaching the topic through ICS memoirs has some limitations in terms of representation and memorialization, but by considering the nature of and reasons for the memoirs’ 58

London, BL, APAC, Belcher, pp. 101–103.

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constructed narratives, they can be used to demonstrate the attitudes of these men and their legacy within the Punjab. The nature of these memoirs in themselves suggests something broader about the study of traumatic historical events like forced migration, state change and popular violence. In such cases, the expectation of being able to produce a clear factual narrative of the episode is perhaps a mistaken one. Where the source material for an event relies upon the firsthand accounts of individuals subjected to the trauma of physical and emotional disruption, witnessing and being involved in violence, it is not a solid factual narrative that emerges but a sense of the times as has been collectively remembered. For British civil servants working in Punjab up to 1947, bearing witness to such episodes of violence, with the concomitant realization of the futility of their own attempts to control the situation, prompted a similar response. In memoirs of the period, there are consistent narrativizations of a dramatic change in 1947 from power to powerlessness, an imagery used to support the system in which they had worked. In this paper, I have considered three elements of this remembering. The first aspect of British ICS experience in 1946–1947 was the loss of the basis of colonial rule in India, the undermining of status as acted out through the prestige of ‘whiteness’. This performance of power was at the heart of British rule in India and shaped the nature of the administration, in particular, the ability of such a small cadre of often very young British men to control the huge population of the subcontinent. Reflections in these memoirs on the nature of the service they entered in the 1920s and 1930s recognize the features which were thrown into sharp relief by their collapse, once British departure had been announced in 1947. These aspects included the quick acceptance of young probationers into a position of significant power, the importance of carefully applied action in a visible context to achieve an imagery of control, and the ideas of a unified service in which one ‘towed the line’ to good effect in demonstrating one’s membership of the elite. Within their memories of the ICS culture lies also a reflection on the period directly before British departure from the subcontinent. The prestige on which these ICS tenets leant, evaporated as the political force behind it was removed. In recognizing the smooth running of pre-1946 Punjab, the ICS men’s memoirs recall and contextualize the rapid decline of their own position, but also accentuate a representation of colonial Punjab as stable and controlled as against a rejection of paternalistic government in favour of chaos at independence.

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The second aspect of the transfer period which becomes apparent in these memoirs is the narrativization of communal calm prior to the violence of 1946–1947. Supported by a stable Unionist government and cooperative war effort in the Punjab, the narrative of peace before the decision to partition Punjab also indicates a desire to mark out the unpredictability and corollary uncontrollability of the partition violence, simply to avert the sense of personal responsibility for deaths witnessed during 1947. In conjunction with the loss of status the previous section recognized, the experience of violence without the level of control sufficient to prevent it, was a traumatising one. A sense of responsibility for the lives of those living in the district continued, with a recognition of their lack of capacity to provide any effective protection. The consistency of the narrative that depicts the colonial system smoothly at work prior to 1946, and subsequently uncontrollably altered, involves an element other than a realistic description: it represents a collective remembering of events which these men found difficult to come to terms with, and creates an imagery of the Raj as an unshakably effective institution prior to the events of the mid-1940s. The final section indicates the extent to which ICS memoirs portray the transfer of power as in essence simply a power vacuum: that a key element of the partition experience of these men was of a poverty of manpower, crippling their ability to effect any control over the situation, or to hand over power to the new local state. This sense of breakdown of the local state compounds the effects of the previous two sections to indicate a situation in which British ICS men were personally disempowered but were still looked to for a response. These memoirs thus portray a position of responsibility without power. Partly this is aimed at the government without whose support the local state lost its status, and also it finds fault with the forces of history which brought self-rule and democracy: in the final year of their experience, these men saw not a potentially successful state but a power vacuum in which they were left to observe atrocities which they had no power to prevent. The transfer of power in the local state is thus shaped into a memorialization which celebrates late colonial India in order to condemn and extract the ICS from the violent birth of postcolonial Punjab at partition. In their partition narratives, British civil servants portray a collapse of the local state and loss of power which negated the efforts of their personal and professional investment in the Punjab. Combining an effort to overcome the trauma of their experiences and cope with the guilt of having been relatively powerless bystanders

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to tragic violence, these narratives, like those of the people actually involved in bloodshed, emphasize the unpredictability of the events of 1947 in order to overcome their memory. In narrativizing a sudden descent into uncontrollable violence at partition, these ICS memoirs validate the careers of individuals and in so doing, construct a collective memorial to the colonial system. The pessimism underlining ICS attitudes to democracy in the subcontinent is in some sense not surprising, in that their own careers and self-worth were built upon a paternalistic style of government. However, at the stage when these men chose a career in the subcontinent, the 1920s and 1930s, not only was the pressure for independent government high in India, it was a declared aim of the British administration. In this sense, animosity towards the realization of independent democracy seems rather more unexpected: after all, this was the recognized target of the British administration’s role in this period. This does then beg the question of what legacy these men left in the Punjab. Many of the memoirs paint a vision of collapse for the Punjab, a sharp disjuncture between an effective administration, and a chaotic democracy. Continuity is not something they seem to have considered possible. The transformation to a democratic modern nation state, had an underlying element of connection with ICS values and the mentality that went with it. A strong element of this mentality was pessimism about the viability of democracy as a workable system of government in a country like India. The practical retention of the colonial administrations’ ‘steel frame’ and the men involved in running them, necessarily holds some basis in a surviving mentality of pessimism about India and Indians—a seed of doubt about the project of the future in evidence as an institution and a cadre with an investment in what had gone before.

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notes to contributors

editor: Joya Chatterji, University of Cambridge book review editor: Norbert Peabody, University of Cambridge execu tive commit tee Seema Alavi, University of Delhi Timothy Harper, University of Cambridge Caroline Humphrey, University of Cambridge

Charles Schencking, University of Hong Kong Hans Van de Ven, University of Cambridge David Washbrook, University of Cambridge

editorial board Shahid Amin, University of Delhi Sunil Amrith, University of London Christopher Bayly, University of Cambridge Sumantra Bose, The London School of Economics & Political Science Prasenjit Duara, National University of Singapore Wang Gungwu, National University of Singapore Farhat Hasan, University of Delhi Engseng Ho, Duke University Isabel Hofmeyr, University of Witwatersrand Indivar Kamtekar, Jawaharlal Nehru University Sunil Khilnani, The Johns Hopkins University Victor T. King, University of Leeds

Victor Lieberman, University of Michigan Claude Markovits, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris Magnus Marsden, University of London Rana Mitter, University of Oxford Tirthankar Roy, University of London James Scott, Yale University Samita Sen, Jadavpur University Ornit Shani, University of Haifa Eric Tagliacozzo, Cornell University Robert Travers, Cornell University C. J. W.-L. Wee, Nanyang Technological University Thongchai Winichakul, University of Wisconsin-Madison Tan Tai Yong, National University of Singapore Yangwen Zheng, University of Manchester

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JANUARY 2011

CONTENTS

1 7 33 57 81 109 131 159

PART 1

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VOLUME 45

TAYLOR C. S HERMAN , W ILLIAM G OULD AND S ARAH A NSARI : From Subjects to Citizens: Society and the Everyday State in India and Pakistan, 1947–1970 E LEANOR N EWBIGIN : Personal Law and Citizenship in India’s Transition to Independence W ILLIAM G OULD : From Subjects to Citizens? Rationing, refugees and the publicity of corruption over Independence in UP YASMIN K HAN : Performing Peace: Gandhi’s assassination as a critical moment in the consolidation of the Nehruvian state TAYLOR C. S HERMAN : Migration, Citizenship and Belonging in Hyderabad (Deccan), 1946–1956 I AN TALBOT: Punjabi Refugees’ Rehabilitation and the Indian State: Discourses, Denials and Dissonances M ARKUS D AECHSEL : Sovereignty, Governmentality and Development in Ayub’s Pakistan: the Case of Korangi Township S ARAH A NSARI : Everyday expectations of the state during Pakistan’s early years: Letters to the Editor, Dawn (Karachi), 1950–1953 D ANIEL H AINES : Concrete ‘progress’: irrigation, development and modernity in mid-twentieth century Sind C ATHERINE C OOMBS : Partition Narratives: Displaced trauma and culpability among British civil servants in 1940s Punjab

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Modern Asian Studies

PART 1

Modern Asian Studies

Modern Asian Studies

VOLUME 45

Cambridge Journals Online For further information about this journal please go to the journal website at:

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Page 1

VOLUME 45

PART 1

JANUARY 2011 ISSN 0026-749X

From Subjects to Citizens: Society and the Everyday State in India and Pakistan, 1947–1970 Guest Editors Taylor C. Sherman, William Gould and Sarah Ansari