You might meet anyone from a nawab to a professor. Rich men offered thousands of rupees if we could hire them an aeroplane to Karachi. It seemed possible to buy anything from a taxi to a hawker’s box of matches.32
Taxis did change hands. As of September 1947 beturbanned Sikhs replaced henna-ed Muslims at the wheel of most of the capital’s public conveyances. The burning, looting and lynching lasted the best part of a month; and as with the next pogrom to overtake the capital – that of 1984, in which Sikhs would be the target – some officials were accused of connivance and numerous political hotheads of incitement. On both occasions, adequate troops failed to materialise, with the peacekeeping burden in 1947 being assumed by a variety of volunteer organisations.
On one occasion Nehru himself joined the volunteers. Leaping from his official car, he laid into a Hindu trundling a handcart piled high with stolen goods. He demanded that they be returned. The man refused, whereupon the Prime Minister seized him by the throat and shook him. The offender did not strike back. ‘If I must die, it is an honour to do so at your hands,’ he croaked. Nehru then relented.33
*
In the camp at Humayun’s Tomb, which backs onto railway tracks, Taya Zinkin, a young volunteer and later a reporter, welcomed the news that some of the refugees were to be moved out by train to Pakistan. They, however, refused to budge without a military escort and an assurance that she would personally hold herself responsible for their safety. Both safeguards were forthcoming, and ‘7,500 men, women and children piled into the train, onto it, under it and in between it’.
It was an incredible sight. They were riding to safety and a new life. In the setting sun they waved at me from the roofs, the windows, the footboards. I stood on the platform waving back … My train was the biggest train to Pakistan. For a long time it would be the last. It was ambushed in Patiala by the Sikhs. The military escort did its duty to the last man; not one survived; they were Gurkhas. Five hundred refugees reached Lahore safely but as the train pulled up in the Lahore station there were 3,000 dead and 4,000 so severely wounded as to be left for dead.
By the time calm had been restored in Delhi, the city could no longer be described as having India’s largest urban concentration of Muslims. Not all were evacuated to Pakistan, but the incoming tide of Hindus and Sikhs so swamped their numbers as to transform the city’s demography and geography and launch its population’s inexorable growth from around a million in 1950 to nearly twenty million by the century’s end. The same tragic scenes and the same dramatic growth were witnessed in Lahore, which became a wholly Muslim city when its sizeable Hindu-Sikh population virtually disappeared overnight. Other cities on both sides of the new border were similarly affected. Karachi, though comparatively calm, lost its large Hindu mercantile community to Bombay. In their stead, it absorbed the bulk of those Muslims from cities in central and northern India (principally Lucknow, Allahabad, Bhopal, etc.) who had opted for Pakistan. Mostly Urdu-speakers and once prime movers in the demand for a Muslim homeland, these muhajirs (a term cognate with haj/hijra that sanctified their ‘flight’ from India by associating it with that of the Prophet from Mecca) would jealously retain their identity in their promised land and contribute a clamorous new element to Pakistan’s ethnic mix. As muhajirs competed with Sindhis, Pathans and Balochis for jobs and housing in what was Pakistan’s commercial as well as its administrative capital, Karachi underwent a transformation into Pakistan’s Calcutta.
Even places in the extreme south of the subcontinent were affected when the Indian government in Delhi urged constituent provinces/states, like Madras, to take such refugees as they could handle. But the response was not always favourable, mainly because it was unclear whether the control and expense of relief and rehabilitation should be borne by the states affected or by the central government. Friction and delays resulted. Nor were the refugees themselves always keen on resettlement in distant lands. The rains there might fall at the wrong time of year, the crops might be new to them and the language unknown to them. Just as Punjabis preferred to be accommodated in the Punjab, Bengalis expressed a preference for staying in Bengal.
This was bad news for Calcutta. As East Bengali refugees poured into the city after 1948, the numbers living on the streets or sleeping on the railway platforms could be counted in the hundreds of thousands, and those corralled into shanty towns and squatter camps in the millions. The camps spread to the west bank of the river Hooghly and to all the city’s surrounding districts: ‘what was once a rural hinterland was transformed in less than two decades into a huge urban sprawl’.34 By the 1990s it was estimated that there were 2,000 bustees, or shanty slums, on the east bank of the river and a further 1,500 on the west bank. Three million people lived in them, representing 49 per cent of the city’s total population; and of these, 87 per cent were classed as immigrants, mostly from East Bengal.
Amongst the immigrants themselves there was a sense that they were in Calcutta as of right. Mostly Hindus and all Bengali-speakers, they felt safe among other Hindu Bengalis and, though now in India, were consoled to be still in their native Bengal. Conditions might be appalling but they were reluctant to embrace onward resettlement in some totally alien corner of the subcontinent. A few lucky thousands were squeezed into vacant lands either within West Bengal itself or in neighbouring Bihar. And some of the urban colonies actually prospered as employment initiatives blossomed and the tents gave way to mud and thatch, then clapboard, corrugated iron and a semblance of permanence. For most, though, a sheet offered the only shelter and minimal government relief the only sustenance. Laid out like sardines on roadsides and railway platforms, they blocked the thoroughfares and fouled the amenities. Cholera became rife. The city was choking to death on a surfeit of people.
To address the situation, an ambitious scheme was launched in the late 1950s. A substantial part of West Bengal’s East Bengali intake was to be resettled five hundred kilometres away in sparsely populated forest uplands along the borders of Orissa and what is now Chattisgarh. The 200,000 square kilometres allocated for this exercise in pioneering was known as Dandakaranya, a term that translates as either ‘the forest of Dandak’ or ‘the forest of punishment’. Trees and scrub were cleared, plots laid out, loans offered, wells dug, roads cut, and by 1973 some 25,000 families had removed there. But they had often done so reluctantly, and already they were drifting back to Bengal. By 1979 nearly half had left. To riverine rice-farmers, getting crops to grow in the thin and moisture-unretentive soil was worse than punishment; dams had failed to materialise, crop yields were dismal, there was no alternative employment and the indigenous tribal people deeply resented the newcomers. The settlers, in short, were far from settled. ‘They say that their love for West Bengal is alive as their hope about Dandakaranya is dead,’ ran a 1978 news report of the new exodus, ‘that all their Dandakaranya days were dark and dreary … “because of the humiliating conditions in which they lived”.’35
But returning to Bengal was not that easy. By now the whole issue of the East Bengali refugees had been heavily politicised. To the astute politicians of West Bengal the grievances of a vast and heavily concentrated community had initially represented a desirable vote bank. Leftist parties, especially the Communist Party of India, had espoused the refugee cause and had duly fought the Dandakaranya plan on their behalf. Congress, happy to see the Communist vote depleted, had supported it. But by the time the Dandakaranya settlers began drifting back, the Communists were in power in West Bengal as part of a Left Front government. The votes of the returnees were no longer a priority. Re-rehabilitating them could only alienate existing supporters and damage the prospects of reconstruction. Tens of thousands were therefore turned back. Thousands more were forcibly evicted from an island they had nevertheless illegally occupied amid the mangroves of the Sundarbans.
Exiles four times over – from East Bengal, West Bengal, Dandakaranya and then the Sundarbans – this pathetic band typified the tragedy of Bengal’s ‘long Partition’. What became of them is unclear, but it may be no coincidence that in the wake of their wanderings there would spread what in 2010 Manmohan Singh, India’s Prime Minister, would call the nation’s ‘gravest internal security challenge’. He was referring to the so-called ‘Naxalite’ or ‘Maoist’ revolutionaries whose armed insurrection was terrorising large parts of eastern and central India. In one of several attacks, seventy-six members