120002766-Essay_1

‘The Partition of India, and its accompanying violence, was inevitable’. Discuss.


The cartoon, published at the height of communal violence and just after the Partition plan was

announced, appears to show just how haphazard the split was. Nehru and Jinnah are presented as

obsessive magicians, carelessly slicing into a beautiful India to perform a trick that is doomed to fail

and cause much bloodshed, while the ineffectual Gandhi watches on. This is clear Indian nationalist

caricature, but it presents a common bewilderment over the Partition process and its consequences.

It elicits the question of how the parties had reached such a dramatic and drastic situation or, in

other words, ‘how did it come to this?’ A great number of historians and theorists have asked these

questions, and have therefore explored whether this unprecedented historical event could have

been prevented, or whether it was inevitable. This essay shall examine and evaluate a number of

approaches, and shall argue that an answer requires clarity on the nature of the communal divide,

and the point at which the divide became to be seen as irreconcilable. Moreover, most accounts of

Partition focus on the high politics, but this author recognises that Partition and violence were

intimately linked, each feeding the other. Therefore we shall also analyse the nature of violence, its

causes, and whether one of the most widespread instances of human violence in the Twentieth

Century was inevitable. What shall become clear is that while there were some concrete

socioeconomic differences between the religious communities, these were accentuated and

manipulated by political elites to the point that the divisions became to be seen as irreconcilable,

1


even primordial. It was at this point that Partition, as well as its accompanying violence, became

inevitable.

Firstly, we must clarify our terms. ‘Partition’ refers not only to the geographical division of the British

Indian Empire into the Dominion of Pakistan and the Union of India, but also the division of its

assets, i.e. its armed forces, transport infrastructure, the central treasury, and the like; in other

words, Partition was the forced split of an entire state and its human communities, and all that

entails. Violence is, however, more difficult to accurately define. Indeed there is historical debate

over its nature and temporality. Traditional historians tend to assert that the violence that

characterised Partition was generally an extension and intensification of the violence that had

marred India’s long journey to Independence (Thomas-Symonds, 2012: 180-181). However more

recently, historians have begun to conceptualise it as something further; for Yasmin Khan it was

“ethnic cleansing”, for Paul Brass it had “substantial genocidal aspects” (Khan, 2008: 4; Brass, 2003:

72). This debate is not just semantical because the former perception makes what happened appear

to be an unfortunate side-note to the high politics, whereas the latter terms connote a greater sense

of culpability, association and intimacy with the forces of governance at the time. As will become

clear in this essay, the link between the horrific violence and the events leading to Partition itself are

not so separate, and the inevitability of each is highly interconnected.

The difficulty with assessing the inevitability of a historical event is that its causes are not temporally

or spatially linear, but are often multifaceted, interconnected, nuanced and vague. It is rather like a

river; it has a number of source tributaries, which in turn have their own sources. One could aim to

go as far back as possible to find the ultimate source, the preliminary stream, the groundwater, the

water vapour; but eventually the process of direct causation becomes tenuous. One will begin to

describe processes that do not necessarily conclude with a river. So it is with history: there are often

a great deal of factors in play, but we must be wary of determinism.

With that in mind, there is significant historical debate over the date the formation of Pakistan

became inevitable, and the discourse can be categorised into two camps. The further back the

historian looks, the more likely it is that they will contend that there was an “underlying fault line of

Hindu-Muslim relations”, whereas the later the date is placed the more likely it is that the historian

views such differences as “modern political inventions” (Brass, 2003: 73). In other words, was the

communal divide intrinsic, or was it a political construction?

Pakistani nationalist politicians then and now like to present the differences as fundamental and

therefore unbridgeable, to rationalise the nation-making project. Muhummad Ali Jinnah, the

2


founder of Pakistan, presented this rationale while making the case for a separate Muslim state

called Pakistan during the Lahore Resolution;

“Hindus and Muslims belong to two different religious philosophies, social customs,

literatures. They neither intermarry nor interdine together and, indeed, they belong to two

different civilizations which are based mainly on conflicting ideas and conceptions” (Jinnah,

1940)

Many students of Partition agree. They look at the history of the Muslim population in India and how

it distinguished itself from other communal groups like Hindus and Sikhs. Islam arrived in the 12 th

Century through successive foreign invasions and Arab traders, and for many periods dominated the

Indian political landscape, for instance during the Delhi Sultanate and Mughal Empire. This history

fed the narrative of Muslim nationalists, with many Muslim rulers over Hindu-majority Princely

states a living reminder of previous glory. Indeed it was “its historical memories of lordship over a

vast Indian empire that gave it such special importance in the Indian constitutional problem”

(Hodson, 1997: 11). Since that age, however, the Muslim community had suffered a socioeconomic

and subsequent political decline. By the mid-1800s, many Muslims were landless labourers and poor

peasants, and generally had a small middle class: “they were served by competent Hindu

subordinates of whom there was always a sufficient supply” (Spear, 1970: 223; Wolpert, 2009: 323).

Spear also notes cultural differences as many conservative Muslims refused to learn English when

the British made it government and legal business’ official language in 1835, but Hindus did not as

they had previously had to learn Persian under previous invasions. This meant Hindus “soon

monopolised the subordinate services. Muslims therefore found themselves not only shut out from

office, but deprived of all hope of ever returning to it.” (Spear, 1970: 223-4). As with many other

instances of communal tension and violence worldwide, once separate communities find themselves

to be unequal, and once those inequalities are formalised in a socio-political structure, it becomes

much easier to develop alternative ideologies which promote difference over similarity, and partition

over unity. Thus many historians see Partition as being inevitable at a very early stage, because the

various differences between the Hindu and Muslim communities had been institutionalised and

were seen as fundamental.

These differences began to be articulated at a state-wide level during the spread of nationalism, an

ideology that was to dominate the world for the next century, and lead to the creation of two

opposing national movements, and ultimately states. Many historians therefore cite the coming of

nationalism to India as the moment Partition became inevitable, because as a mass movement it

allowed the sense of difference between the communities to be actualised on a larger scale,

particularly for the Muslim community. It was during the period of British rule that India’s industry

3


significantly developed, and this industrialisation allowed for the greater flow of information, people

and ideas. This meant that people had a greater sense of interconnectedness and therefore paved

the way for the development of competing nationalist visions (Gellner, 2009). It was during this time

that there was a “rediscovery of history in the late Nineteenth Century. Indian nationalists wished to

make India an independent nation-state in the Western sense” (Tanham, 1992: 131). While both

Indian and Muslim nationalisms were anti-colonial, they had a different character: Indian

nationalism maintained an inclusive, tolerant worldview that can be best characterised as civic

nationalism, whereas Muslim nationalism was primarily rooted in religion, and was therefore more

exclusive. This meant that an early and potentially fundamental dichotomy was developing.

Yet even though there were significant political differences forming between the communities and

these were beginning to be articulated with the founding of the Indian National Congress in 1885

and the Muslim League in 1906, that did not necessarily mean that they would be translated into

effective national political movements. Indeed, by this point the ‘two-nation’ theory was years away

from being articulated, and therefore although there were a number of seeds planted for Partition

and violence, the conditions were not sufficient for germination. Contra the ‘primordialist’ view

where Hindus and Muslims had essential differences, one could argue that it was the gradual growth

of democratic mass participation that forged a divide between the Hindu and Muslim populations,

thereby creating the conditions where Partition would become inevitable.

In response to rising demands for greater Indian say in governance, the British slowly introduced

some reforms, such as the 1909 Indian Democratic Act in which the “size and functions of both the

central and provincial legislatures were expanded” (Hoveyda, 2010: 57). At the same time, there

were competing demands from Indian and Muslim nationalists over the type of representation. The

Muslim League was founded on the grounds of being fearful of a Hindu majority in government, and

therefore they campaigned for separate communal electorates in which there were guaranteed

seats for Muslim candidates (Spear, 1979: 226; Hodson, 1997: 14). This was in direct opposition to

Congress who held a vision of an all-encompassing community of India. However, as the demand for

a separate Muslim state was, at best, a marginal strand of thought, Congress was happy to accept

Muslim support for greater Indian self-governance in return for allowing separate Muslim

electorates, both of which were given in the 1919 Montague-Chelmsford Reforms. Greater

enfranchisement alongside institutionalised communal politics was therefore extremely impactful.

As Hodson argues,

“if electors vote as members of a minority community they will not only be bound to

elect fellow communalists, but will be persuaded to vote for ‘good’ fellow

4


communalists, those who will put the interests of their community first and assert its

differences from other communities and its interests in contrast to theirs” (Ibid.: 15).

Thus, greater democratic participation allowed for the dissemination of divergent visions of a future

India to the masses, and provided the context in which communal differences could be asserted. In

this extremely fluid period where the Raj was developing and reforming, the context of political

choice was constantly changing. The British offered increased participation and opportunities for

governance in new institutions at all levels. Each change required another debate on which

categories of people should be represented, and therefore competing ideologies continued to

permeate the national discourse (Brass, 2003: 73).

As we have seen, there are a number of ways of looking at the divide between Hindus and Muslims

in pre-Partition India. While there were socioeconomic and subsequent political differences, as well

as an ever-more democratic and statewide entrenchment of those differences, that does not make

those dissimilarities a natural feature of Indian society. Rather, they were the result of a gradual

process of political invention. Muslim nationalists emphasised ‘primordial’ differences from the rest

of the Indian population, and fought to have separate electorates representing them which

entrenched those differences on a regional and national level, but that only goes to show that the

process of nationalisation was a top-down one; it was initiated and led by the elites. For instance,

when the British announced the Partition of Bengal in 1905, Muslim leaders were previously

opposed. But when faced with Indian nationalist rhetoric

“with its implication that Bengal was a Hindu land, pressure on poor Muslims to use

swadeshi cloth they could ill afford, and the riotous behaviour of Hindu crowds, their

position began to change. Muslim spokesmen turned to the new province as a way to

secure a place for themselves in eastern India” (Metcalf and Metcalf, 2012: 159).

Therefore they encouraged the growth of Muslim nationalist action by presenting themselves as

distinct from the Hindus. As time went on, there was a continuous and fluid battle over the future of

the Indian state in which figures like Jinnah, Gandhi, Ali and Nehru put forth visions of India, which

they claimed were incompatible. The divisions between the communities of India were not intrinsic,

but were fashioned over time by these leaders and their movements. What is clear is that the

communal divide was mostly artificial, indeed Rahmat Ali, who first coined the word ‘Pakistan’ in

1933, “was despised and rejected by the Muslim League leaders who found his ideas

unsophisticated and drastic” (Ahmed, 2002: 13). It was only a number of years later when the ‘two

nation’ theory found fruition in the Muslim League after significant political failures by Congress to

co-opt them into the Indian nationalist fold, as we shall see later. Khan thus blames “imagined

5


nationalisms” for the creation of seemingly mutually exclusive political identities (Khan, 2008: 210).

The divide was thus a socio-political construction.

The British heavily contributed to this illusion. As the last imperial rulers of India, they had a huge

impact on the development of communal politics. A number of historians, such as M.N. Das, have

portrayed much of the British governance of Indian communal politics as a “deliberate attempt to

disrupt the forces of Indian nationalism and thereby perpetuate the British Raj” (Das, 1964 quoted

by Koss, 1967: 381). By encouraging slow constitutional change, the government aimed to do it

along its own lines rather than “put up futile barriers to be swept away one by one by an ever rising

nationalist flood” (Spear, 1970: 206), hence the 1935 Government of India Act which enfranchised

35 million Indians and paved the way for elections. This expanded the scope of separate electorates

for Muslim candidates, meaning India was now characterised by communal politics. One should

reject Das’ Machiavellian interpretation of the British because, from their perspective, granting

communal electorates was a seemingly rational policy at the time. The painful legacy of the Irish

independence struggle meant that many officials were acutely of the “consequences of a

fragmented national movement” (Koss, 1967: 381). Whatever their intentions, what has been

debated is the effects of these constitutional changes. Hasan argues that “the devolution of power,

so vociferously demanded by the nationalists, ironically widened the divisions in Indian society”

because the communal differences were entrenched in constitutional agreements (1980: 1395). Yet

while the British formalised the religious divide, it had already matured to the point where such

official divisions were needed. Indeed, “it is not possible to divide and rule unless the ruled are ready

to be divided. The British may have used the Hindu-Muslim rivalry for their own advantage, but they

did not invent it” (Hodson. 1997: 15-16). Rather, “the demand for separate electorates may have

been an effect rather than a cause of communalism” (Kooiman, 1995: 2123). This may appear to

contradict this essay’s previous argument, but this is not the case. Competing nationalisms had

already been constructed and predated serious British efforts at Indian constitutional reform. While

the British institutionalised Hindu-Muslim differences through a communal policy, communalism as a

political fact was already nationwide.

Therefore, it is evident that while there were a number of socioeconomic and political factors at

play, the nature of the Hindu-Muslim divide was artificial and constructed by local and national

political leaders, and furthered by the British. As the divide was fundamentally a political creation,

we can argue that Partition only became inevitable when this political divide came to be perceived

as irreconcilable. Contra the primordialist views of some, this was only the case towards the latter

end of British rule.

6


There are a number of periods that have been highlighted as moments when this divide came to be

seen as irreconcilable, and many historians have placed a great deal of emphasis on the abilities of

Jinnah and the simultaneous political failings of Congress. Such was Jinnah’s impact that some

historians cite the moment that he rejected reconciliation with Congress as the moment Partition

became, if not inevitable, then extremely likely (Ahmed, 2002: 13; Spear, 1970: 228-9; Philips, 1986:

249). Previously a prominent member of Congress, he was an advocate of Hindu-Muslim unity

(indeed he helped shape the 1916 Lucknow Pact between the League and Congress), but he resigned

from Congress in 1920 over Gandhi’s satyagraha campaign, instead favouring a gradualist approach.

He returned to politics to take up presidency of the Muslim League in 1933 but the League

performed terribly in the 1937 provincial elections, with Congress winning firm majorities in all seats

including Muslim ones. Congress demonstrated its political weaknesses by declining coalitions,

despite the League’s expectations to the contrary, which Philips criticises as “ill-advised and socially

destructive” (Ibid.: 246-7) because it led to Muslims feeling a great sense of political powerlessness.

It had a “traumatic effect on Jinnah”, forming a “Rubicon in his life, to which, once crossed he never

looked back” (Singh, 2010: 188; Spear, 1970: 228-9). The realisation for Jinnah, and for the wider

Muslim public, was that Congress would win on the back of its strength with Hindu voters and

therefore “in a majoritarian minded, Congress ruled India there was no place for the Muslims”

(Singh, 2010: 198). This was an epiphany for him, and in the subsequent years he dedicated his life

to securing Muslim autonomy. In this regard he was fundamental to Partition: “without [Jinnah’s]

relentless eloquence Muslim nationalism and the demand for Muslim self-determination could have

been set forth so authoritatively” (Ahmed, 2002: 13). While it was to be a few years before the

Muslim League adopted any kind of Partition plan, 1937 was clearly a turning point for communal

relations in India. A partition of the state was not definitely inevitable, but it was clear after 1937

that some kind of massive constitutional change had to take place.

In contrast, some argue that Partition only became inevitable at the very last minute. Judd notes

that a partition plan was not presented until the final hour. The last Viceroy Lord Mountbatten

presented Nehru with ‘Plan Balkan’ in April 1947 which “devolved power to the provinces” leaving

them to individually negotiate their relationship with a weak central government (Judd, 2004: 182).

After Nehru shot down his suggestions, Mountbatten instead presented the final plan that

“reasserted the concept of an Indian state as a continuing entity, while allowing for the secession of

those provinces where the majority of the inhabitants desired such a move” (Ibid.: 184); i.e. partition

of the Indian state. The argument goes that it was only at this point, where the actors had agreed to

a final plan, then Partition was inevitable. Yet as we have seen thus far, the path for some kind of

7


partition was already set by the divide between Hindus and Muslims generally being seen as

irreconcilable. The post-war events merely hastened this process.

An acceleration, rather than cause of the Partition process is clear in this historical period. The

British government believed that large constitutional problems should be delayed until the Second

World War had finished, and so the Congress national leadership resigned at Viceroy Lord

Linlithglow’s failure to consult them over India declaring war on Germany and Japan. They were also

imprisoned due to the 1942 Quit India campaign. Comparatively, Jinnah curried favour with the UK

government by supporting the war effort and was also free to campaign nationally, which

significantly strengthened his hand. Attlee’s post-war administration immediately came into office

with a decolonisation programme, telling the new Viceroy Mountbatten that there had to be a

constitutional settlement by 1948. By this point, “violence and repression [had risen] to their peak at

this time of terror, fear, and hatred. Gandhi could no more control his ‘troops’ than the British could

keep their police and soldiers from opening fire on what they considered ‘mobs of traitors’”

(Wolpert, 2009; 352). At this time, events only served to speed up the path to partition. The 1946

elections gave undeniable mandates to both Congress and the League in their respective electorates,

leaving the country politically and institutionally divided. The Simla Conference, the Cabinet Mission

Plan, and numerous other strategies set out to resolve India’s constitutional difficulties, but they all

failed due to the lack of agreement between the League and Congress. By 1946, Congress had

resigned itself to the “necessity of partition in some form” (Philips, 1986: 243). The level of violence

and political disagreement was such that partition became the only viable option (Wolpert, 2009:

366; Philips, 1986: 250). Thus we can see that the Partition process was sped up significantly due to

the Second World War, a change in the British government, and significant levels of violence, but the

underlying issues were planted a number of years before. While the specific Partition Plan only

became inevitable when the main actors agreed to it in 1947, it is this essay’s contention that once

the communal divide between Hindus and Muslims became essentialised in the years leading up to

the war, then Partition in some form was inevitable.

What then of the extraordinary levels of violence that accompanied India’s journey to Partition?

There is a general lack of literature over the nature of the violence itself, as well as detail as to what

actually happened. Most histories focus on the high politics, with much of the emphasis on the role

of Mountbatten, Nehru and Jinnah in the latter end of the historical period. But contrary to this

traditional account, it would be fallacious to think that the high politics was separate from the

violence. As Khan states, “Partition’s elitist politics and everyday experiences are not as separate as

they may seem at first glance because mass demonstrations, street fighting and the circulation of

8


rumours all overlapped with the political decision making process” (2008: 7). Local police records, for

example, have rarely been looked at and are “almost assuredly inadequate and highly falsified”

because “the guilt associated with the killings, looting, arson, and abetment of them was shared by

many people at the time, including the police” (Brass, 2003: 74). In order to fully understand

Partition, greater research needs to be done on investigating the nature of its accompanying

violence.

There is, however, general agreement that the British frequently did not do enough to keep order

and prevent massacres occurring, meaning that the huge levels of violence were immediately

inevitable. Once the Attlee government was in place, it was “in a hurry to leave India” (Ahmed, 2002:

14), and its resources were stretched all over the world. That meant that during Partition a “totally

inadequate boundary force” was retained to keep the peace during transition (Wolpert, 2009: 368) –

for example, only 55,000 in the entire Punjab (Thomas-Symonds, 2012: 181). This significantly

increased the likelihood of intercommunal violence. This was also partly due to the Muslim League

distrusting Mountbatten. They interpreted his (and his wife’s) relations with Nehru as partial, and

therefore did not allow him to become the first Governor General of an independent Pakistan, as he

was to become of India. Judd therefore contends that “it is very likely that, if the original plan had

been carried out, Mountbatten, with some control over the military forces of Pakistan, could have

acted to prevent some of the post-partition communal massacres” (2004: 185). As the British were,

in essence, ineffectual policemen, the violence that was generally regionally-contained in Bengal

spread nationwide, particularly in north-western India (Kumar, 1997: 26). By not providing adequate

forces they did not protect the most vulnerable and therefore allowed a tense situation to turn into

a catastrophe. However by this point, the atmosphere in much of India was such that violence was

already occurring; the British merely allowed for it to accentuate and accelerate. Therefore it can be

argued that violence was inevitable before Partition was announced by the British, as it had long

been a feature of the Indian national struggle.

Brass summarises this view:

“Those who hold the view that there was a fundamental fault line of Hindu–Muslim

relations in Indian society and politics also believe that the relations were fundamentally

hostile and antagonistic and that the violence associated with partition was, therefore,

as inevitable as the partition itself.” (2003: 74)

These historians tend to note that religious violence was an ongoing feature of the Indian national

struggle. For instance the 1857 Indian Mutiny, while caused by a mixture of groups for diverse

reasons, was summarily blamed on the Muslim community (Dalrymple, 2006; Spear, 1970: 224).

9


Wolpert describes how dissatisfaction with British rule often led to religious violence. In 1921 in

Malabar, some Muslims declared jihad to establish their own khalifat. This led to riots, rapes and

forced conversions, and subsequent counter-riots by Hindu gangs (Wolpert, 2009: 320). For these

primordialist historians, religious violence appeared to characterise the independence struggle,

meaning that once Partition came, violence was inevitable.

Thus, these historians tend to note that these levels of violence increased significantly during WWII

and after. Indeed the mantra goes that ‘violence caused Partition, and Partition caused violence’. It

has been widely identified that the reason Mountbatten increased the pace of the Partition process

was because communal violence had reached such a devastating crescendo. After Nehru had

effectively rejected the Cabinet Mission Plan’s proposals, Jinnah in his frustration announced a

Direct Action Day on 16th August 1946 to show the passion of Muslim feelings against Congress and

the British. But, “in doing so, he precipitated, perhaps unwittingly, the horrors of riot and massacre

that were to disfigure the coming of independence” (Metcalf and Metcalf, 2012: 217). Direct Action

Day turned into the Great Calcutta Killing where 4000 people died, which in turn spurred further

rioting in Noakhali, Bihar and the Punjab (Ibid.). It is notable that during these events, violence

against Europeans decreased markedly while Hindu-Muslim violence increased exponentially, with

46 Europeans being killed in November 1945, but no Europeans dying by 16th August 1946 (Horowitz,

1973). For the British authorities at this point, “fragmentation rather than partition was now the

most pressing danger” (Spear, 1970: 236) and therefore Mountbatten hastily came up with ‘Plan

Balkan’ and the subsequent final Partition plan. Consequently Philips argues that “after the ‘Great

Calcutta communal killing’ of August 1946 there was no going back; the course for partition was set”

(1986: 243-44). It can therefore seem that as the Muslim and Hindu populations were, throughout

the independence struggle, diametrically opposed with violence directed at each other, that

Partition and violence were intimately linked, and therefore had a shared inevitability.

However it is important that we nuance this point. As this essay has previously argued, Partition only

became inevitable once the Hindu-Muslim divide came to be seen as irreconcilable, due to the

manipulation of the masses by the elites. This process of dichotomisation included using violence as

a tactic to achieve certain political ends. As Das notes, the 1946 riots were characterised by being

highly organised:

“looted booty was carried to waiting lorries for transportation to a central place; shops

were carefully marked with signs so that the crowd left untouched the establishments of

their coreligionists; both League and Hindu activists used Red Cross badges to evade

police detection” (2000: 285)

10


Kulke and Rothermund corroborate, stating that the Muslim chief minister Suhrawardy “engineered

a communal holocaust in Calcutta” in order to “tilt the city’s demographic balance in this way in

favour of the Muslims” (2002: 289). Violence and Partition were therefore interrelated, not because

Hindus and Muslims had a natural enmity, but because violence was used as a political tactic. By the

time the Partition plan was announced and had become inevitable, violence had become a “principal

mechanism in changing the terms of partition by forcing the displacement of peoples” in order to

adjust the population in one group’s favour (Brass, 2003: 82) and be on the right side of the Radcliffe

Line. This clearly shows that the violence of Partition was not a natural, primeval inevitability, but

was based on a political construction that had been maturing over the years. This construction was

the “fiction that there were only two categories of the population of 400 million Indians whose

interests were to be considered: Muslims and non-Muslims” (Ibid.: 95). This was not the case as

throughout the Partition Sikh communities had played an extremely important part, partaking in

various political movements, and themselves implicated in appalling acts of violence. Moreover the

Hindu and Muslim groups were themselves very diverse. However once the communal divide came

to be perceived as implacable, Partition and violence were both inevitable due to the ideology

perpetuated by “ethnic ideologues and activists” that people should be “defined in categorical terms

as belonging to particular religious groups” (Ahmed, 2002: 11; Brass, 2003: 82). Therefore, once

partition along religious lines became inevitable, so did its accompanying violence.

In conclusion, the Partition of India and its associated violence were, to a great extent, inevitable;

but they only became inevitable once the divide between the Muslim and Hindu community had

been constructed and politicised. There were a number of socioeconomic differences between the

communities, but these did not determine their political future. Rather, the spread of nationalism

and democracy helped to perpetuate the ideas of the activists, with the British accelerating this

process. This allowed certain elites to disseminate their ideas to the masses, and as the British

reacted to these movements with greater constitutional reforms these differences were magnified

and entrenched. Yet it was only at the moment that this divide came to be conceived as

irreconcilable, that Partition became inevitable. This was rather late in the day, post-1937 elections

up until the 1940 Lahore Resolution, when Jinnah and a growing number of his followers started

campaigning for a separate state of their own. Moreover, violence, which had often played a major

part in this history, was wound up with the Partition process. It was both a cause of, and effect of

Partition, due to the links between the political elites and their military arms. Due to ‘othering’

ideologies being perpetuated throughout the latter end of this historical period, violence and politics

were interconnected, meaning that once Partition became inescapable, the terrifying, genocidal

violence that accompanied it also became inevitable.

11


Bibliography

1. Ahmed, I., (2002). ‘The 1947 Partition of India: A Paradigm for Pathological Politics in India

and Pakistan’ in Asian Ethnicity. Vol. 3, No. 1, pp. 9-28.

2. Anon., ‘Sawing Through a Woman’ in Pioneer, 1947. Located in Kamra, S., Bearing Witness:

Partition, Independence, End of the Raj. University of Calgary Press, 2002.

3. Brass, P., ‘The partition of India and retributive genocide in the Punjab, 1946-47: Means,

methods, and purposes 1’ in Journal of Genocide Research, 5:1, 71-101, 2003.

4. Dalrymple, W. The Last Mughal: The Fall of Delhi, 1857. Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, 2009.

5. Das, S. (2000), ‘The 1992 Calcutta Riot in Historical Continuum: A Relapse into ‘Communal

Fury’?’ in Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 34, No. 2, pp. 281-306.

6. Gellner, E., Nations and Nationalism. Cornell University Press, 2009.

7. Hasan, M. (1980), ‘Communalism in the Provinces: A Case Study of Bengal and the Punjab,

1922-26’ in Economic and Political Weekly. Vol. 15, No. 33, pp. 1395-1401+1403-1406.

8. Hodson, H. V., The Great Divide: Britain, India, Pakistan. Oxford University Press, 1997.

9. Horowitz, D.L. (1973), ‘Direct, Displaced, and Cumulative Ethnic Aggression’ in Comparative

Politics. Vol. 6, No. 1, pp. 1-16.

10. Hoveyda, A., Indian Government and Politics. Pearson Education India, 2010.

11. Jinnah, M. A., 1940. ‘Address by Quaid-i-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah at Lahore Session of

Muslim League’ by Islamabad Directorate of Films and Publishing, Ministry of Information

and Broadcasting March, 1983. Available at:

http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00islamlinks/txt_jinnah_lahore_1940.html

12. Judd, D., The Lion and the Tiger. Oxford University Press, 2004.

13. Khan, Y. The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan. Yale University Press, 2008.

14. Kooiman, D. (1995), ‘Communalism and Indian Princely States: A Comparison with British

India in Economic and Political Weekly. Vol. 30, No. 34, pp. 2123-2133.

15. Koss, S. (1967), ‘John Morley and the Communal Question’ in The Journal of Asian Studies

Vol. 26, No. 3, pp. 381-387.

16. Kulke, H. and Rothermund, D., A history of India. Routledge, 2002.

17. Kumar, R. (1997), ‘The Troubled History of Partition’ in Foreign Affairs. Vol. 76, No. 1, pp. 22-

34.

18. Metcalf, B. and Metcalf, T., A New History of Modern India. Cambridge University Press,

2012.

12

http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00islamlinks/txt_jinnah_lahore_1940.html


19. Philips, C., (1986). ‘Was the partition of India in 1947 inevitable?’ in Asian Affairs. Vol. 17,

No. 3, pp. 243-251.

20. Singh, J. Jinnah. Oxford University Press, 2010.

21. Spear, P., A History of India Vol. 2. Penguin Books Ltd., 1970.

22. Tanham, G., (1992). ‘Indian Strategic Culture’ in Washington Quarterly. Vol. 15, No. 1, pp.

129-42.

23. Thomas-Symonds, N. Attlee : A Life in Politics. I.B. Tauris and Co. Ltd., 2012.

24. Wolpert, S. A New History of India. Oxford University Press, 2009.

13

120002766-Essay_1

Documents

Transcript of 120002766-Essay_1