‘CALCUTTA IN GRIP OF INSANE LUST FOR FRATRICIDAL BLOOD’ ran the 17 August 1946 headline in the People’s Age, the nation’s Communist (and so confessionally neutral) mouthpiece. The riots amounted to ‘a communal orgy the like of which had never been seen before’. Indeed, the Muslim League’s ‘Direct Action Day’ on the 16th had ‘turned into an open civil war between Hindus and Muslims’.7 Thousands were being killed, the streets were strewn with corpses, the hospitals were overflowing with the wounded, fires raged unchecked, and whole districts were being looted. One witness told of corpses being roped together like sporting trophies, another of babies being hurled from balconies, children clubbed to death, and mothers and daughters abused and butchered. Only the British, usually the butt of Bengali protests, had been left unmolested; and only the police had been minded to observe the declared holiday.
The politicians of both sides had to bear much of the responsibility. Congress members, after walking out of the Bengal Assembly in protest over the holiday resolution, had publicly denounced the League in the most intemperate terms. The League had responded with equally inflammatory sentiments. Both had welcomed the support of known criminal elements whose actions they had subsequently declined to condemn. The League government had at first delayed recalling the police and had then deployed them less than even-handedly; and when the situation was clearly beyond its control, it had failed to call on Bengal’s British Governor to send in the army. The Governor, in turn, should have acted sooner, whether asked to or not. As it was, the killing went on unopposed for two days and unquelled for four. Four thousand died, 11,000 survived serious injuries.
In retrospect, ‘the Great Calcutta Killing’ would come to be seen as the turning point, ‘the watershed’, in South Asian relations. For decades nationalists of every hue had concentrated their fire on British imperialism; a common enemy cemented a common sense of purpose. Now, with independence as good as won, nationalists turned on nationalists in a ‘civil war’ between the country’s two main communities. It was Gandhi’s worst nightmare, Nehru’s idea of madness; and it seemed unstoppable. Rightly or wrongly, the outbreak in Calcutta would be construed as the first eruption in a chain reaction of communal atrocities that, spreading erratically, gained in intensity until a year later they climaxed in the mass genocide of Partition.
Calcutta certainly set the pattern of savagery. No one knew who started the killing. Rumour raced ahead of verifiable report. The gangs responsible, whether Hindu or Muslim, invariably claimed to be avenging prior atrocities or acting in self-defence. Street talk of ‘massacres’ no more captured the full horror than the official designation of the disturbances as ‘riots’. Even ‘civil war’ was something of a misnomer. Some parts of the city were unaffected, with the Communist People’s Age smugly noting that ‘reports from the working-class belt indicate that the hysterical frenzy has not contaminated the workers’. The combatants were divided along purely communal lines, their object being not to expel or detain their opponents but to terrorise, desecrate and exterminate them. Age went unrespected and innocence unacknowledged; just to be of the wrong community was provocation enough. Votive objects – a domestic deity here, a treasured Quran there – were trashed and fouled. Mosques were defaced, shrines burned. Women, the embodiment of every community’s exclusivity, were a particular target. Of those ‘lucky’ to be still alive, some had been raped or abducted, while the dead had been physically incised with the religious hallmarks of their murderers. Either way, the objective was the appropriation of all that the other community held sacred.
As with the later massacres, the scale and the intensity of the Calcutta killings took both British and Indians by surprise. ‘No Indian political leader … neither the [Bengal] government, the opposition nor the press anticipated the magnitude of the tragedy.’ As later too, the national politicians in Delhi seemed more obsessed with the squabble for power than with its consequences for the febrile communities they represented. Like the frailest of firefighters, Gandhi alone would track the flames of violence, touring the stricken areas – Dhaka, then Noakhali (both in eastern Bengal) and then Bihar, all before the end of 1946 – as he fasted, marched and painfully practised the communal harmony that he so tirelessly preached. His colleagues preferred to accuse their political opponents either of starting the troubles or failing to suppress them, both of which only stoked the fires of hatred for the next round of atrocities. No one seemed capable of comprehending the scale and obscenity of the killing. In the midst of forming the interim government, Nehru breezily declared that his arrangements must ‘not be upset because a few persons misbehave in Calcutta’; Jinnah similarly refused to believe that any member of the Muslim League ‘would have taken part in using any violence’. A joint inquiry might have cleared the air. Neither party would agree to it. Instead both conducted their own inquiries. Each duly found against the other.8
Ironically, the effect on the British was wholly counter-productive. ‘Direct Action Day’, though conceived by Jinnah as a way of demonstrating that the League could bite as well as bark and must therefore be taken seriously, merely impressed the British with the urgency of disengaging. The Viceroy and his advisers were convinced that the situation was getting out of control. An all-India civil war seemed imminent, with the British ill-equipped to prevent it and in danger of being caught in the crossfire. Not for the first time, Wavell wavered over the prospects for a peaceful transfer of power and began drawing up a plan B. The ‘B’ stood for ‘Breakdown’ – a breakdown in the constitutional process and a breakdown in law and order. To a military man who had presided over the Allies’ wartime retreats in both North Africa and South-East Asia, a carefully phased withdrawal was the obvious answer, first from the comparatively peaceful south of India to the Gangetic plain, then to the strategic redoubt of the Punjab and the north-west. In this scenario, Jinnah’s Pakistan, if it ever materialised, would come piecemeal, later rather than sooner, and by agreement with Westminster regardless of Congress. The Calcutta Killings had neither advanced the League’s cause nor made Pakistan inevitable. What they did make inevitable was an early British departure and the near certainty of constitution-making being sacrificed to the exigencies of the moment, while the apprehensions of undivided India’s four hundred million citizens were left to fester.
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‘Pakistan? What good is that to us? We want oil, cloth, sugar, wheat. And we want justice – that is all.’
Such were the sentiments expressed by a couple of Qureshi Muslims when, in March 1947, they were asked how they felt about a Pakistan that was looming larger with every communal massacre and constitutional impasse. Qureshis claim descent from the Arab invaders who first brought Islam to India in the eighth century; these ones had bicycles and were heading for a building site near the Narmada river in what is now Madhya Pradesh. Famed for speaking their mind, Qureshis might have been expected to welcome the idea of Pakistan. But in this case their response was wholly negative, and it was not untypical. It echoed that of sundry Pathans, Punjabis, Jats, Mewatis and Rajputs – Muslims and Sikhs as well as Hindus – whose opinions had been quietly canvassed over the previous four months by the inquisitive Malcolm Lyall Darling.
An ageing Quixote on a small grey horse, Darling had ridden out of Peshawar one raw November morning in 1946. From a start within sight of the Khyber Pass, he had been ambling east and south ever since. By March 1947 he was nearing the end of his epic ride in what was roughly the centre of India. Dressed in creaky leather boots, tweeds of many pockets and an outsize sola topi to protect his hairless pate, he looked exactly what he was: ex-Eton, ex-Cambridge and ex-ICS (Britain’s elite Indian Civil Service). But not for him the face-saving constitutional conundrums of Delhi or the peacekeeping anxieties of Calcutta. Darling was controversial. A gentle critic of many aspects of British policy, he had turned to Nehru when planning his itinerary, and would report to Gandhi on the findings of his trip. During thirty-six years’ service his speciality had been setting up agricultural cooperatives and encouraging ‘the Punjab Peasant in Prosperity and Debt’ (as per the title of one