“At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom”.
—Jawaharlal Nehru, 1947
1947 marked the beginning of the most turbulent years in India’s history. In the years that followed, hundreds of thousands were killed in religious riots, by some estimates more than a million, and an estimated 14 million Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs crossed newly drawn borders in one of the largest and most violent mass migrations in history. Exhausted by the Second World War and under pressure from colonies seeking independence, Britain could no longer hold India and looked for a way out. The Royal Indian Navy Mutiny of 1946 showed that discontent had reached the armed forces. Britain relied on 700,000 Indian and 70,000 British soldiers to keep order, and feared the mutiny would spread to the army.
Britain therefore carved up British India in haste. The Radcliffe Line divided it into Pakistan, which was mostly Muslim and split into two wings, and India, which was largely Hindu. But the Line was a crude generalisation that ignored the complexities on the ground. Overnight, millions found themselves a minority on the wrong side of a border, and fear turned to violence. Religious differences contributed to Partition, but British political decisions were the more significant cause: Britain deepened and exploited those divisions until a united India became almost impossible.
India has been a spiritual centre for thousands of years. It is the birthplace of Hinduism, Jainism, Sikhism and Buddhism, while Islam arrived from Arabia in the seventh century. Although the Delhi Sultanate and then the Mughal Empire ruled much of the subcontinent for over six centuries, Hinduism has always been the majority religion. Many Muslims therefore feared that, in a single nation, their interests would always come second. Tensions between supporters and opponents of Partition, often divided along religious lines, escalated into violence. The clearest example is the Great Calcutta Killings, which began on Direct Action Day, the Muslim League’s day of protest on 16 August 1946, as Hindus and Muslims looted and fought each other across the city. The bloodshed deepened mistrust between the two communities and strengthened the argument that they could not live together in peace. In their eyes, Partition became the only solution.
A second religious cause was the spread among Muslims of the Two Nation Theory, which the Muslim League turned into a formal demand in the Lahore Resolution of 1940. Championed by Jinnah, the theory held that the cultural and religious gulf between Hindus and Muslims could never be bridged, and that Islamic identity could survive only in a separate country. It turned religious difference into a demand for a separate state. The Hindi–Urdu controversy shows how Muslim and Hindu identities came to clash. Speakers of Hindi and Urdu can understand each other, but Hindi is written in the Devanagari script and draws its vocabulary from Sanskrit, while Urdu is written in the Perso-Arabic Nastaliq script and draws on Persian and Arabic. Urdu, today the national language of Pakistan, had been the official language of administration in much of northern India since 1837. Three decades later, Hindi advocates began to petition for Hindi to receive equal status. As Hindi became linked with Hindus and Urdu with Muslims, the dispute took on a religious character and fed communal hostility in the decades before Partition. Even so, many Muslims, such as Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, opposed Partition, which suggests that religious difference alone did not cause it.
British rule began in Bengal in 1757, and India became the Empire’s most valuable asset, with abundant natural resources and a huge population. A defining feature of that rule was ‘divide and rule’: Britain deliberately deepened religious and caste differences, then exploited them to fracture Indian society and secure control. In 1940 Churchill told the War Cabinet that he regarded the Hindu–Muslim feud as “the bulwark of British rule in India”. The Indian Councils Act of 1909 shows how this strategy led to Partition, and was arguably the single most important step towards it. The Act created separate electorates for Muslims and so bound religion to politics. Rather than encouraging Indians to vote as one people, it taught Hindus and Muslims to see themselves as separate political communities with separate interests. This laid the foundation for the Muslim League’s demand for a Muslim homeland three decades later.
Mountbatten’s rushed transfer of power was another significant cause of Partition. After the war, civil unrest grew, peaking on Direct Action Day, and the British government wanted to shed commitments abroad, such as its troops in Palestine, to focus on rebuilding at home. National debt had climbed to around 250% of GDP owing to the war, and the view that colonialism was outdated and barbaric was gaining ground. Attlee’s government was therefore willing to grant independence quickly. Mountbatten, who probably feared that a longer transition would end in anarchy, brought the date forward from June 1948 to August 1947. That left just 73 days for the Indian National Congress and the All-India Muslim League to find a way to keep the country whole, and fostered the idea that Partition was the only possible outcome. Disagreements between Jinnah and Nehru over the structure of a united India made compromise harder still, and led British officials to conclude that Partition was the most practical solution. Britain’s withdrawal from Ghana offers a contrast: Ghana moved to independence gradually over six years, while Britain left India 10 weeks after announcing the new date. The comparison suggests that Britain handled India’s transition recklessly, and that this haste contributed to Partition. British politics therefore drove Partition both in the long term, by dividing people along religious and caste lines, and in the short term, by bringing forward the date of independence.
Religious differences undoubtedly contributed to Partition, breeding mistrust and lending weight to the Two Nation Theory, but British politics was the more significant cause. Religious conflict had flared on the subcontinent for more than 1,000 years since the arrival of Islam, yet none had been as severe or produced a separate state. British policy bound religion to politics through separate electorates, and Mountbatten’s change of date made any alternative unlikely. Religion created the divisions; British politics turned them into Partition.
–
All-India Muslim League. Lahore Resolution. Lahore, 23 March 1940.
Azad, Abul Kalam. India Wins Freedom. Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 1988.
Brass, Paul R. Language, Religion and Politics in North India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974.
Brendon, Piers. The Decline and Fall of the British Empire, 1781–1997. London: Jonathan Cape, 2007.
Great Britain. Indian Councils Act, 1909. 9 Edw. 7 c. 4. London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1909.
Nehru, Jawaharlal. Tryst with Destiny. Speech delivered to the Constituent Assembly, New Delhi, 14–15 August 1947.