THE INDEPENDENCE OF INDIA AND PAKISTAN, 1947

As the largest and most populous colony in the British Empire, India assured Britain a huge market for its manufactured goods, access to key raw materials, and a strategic position in southwest Asia. Not surprisingly, Britain resisted the repeated demands of the Indian National Congress for independence. Led by Mohandas Gandhi, who was ably assisted by Jawaharlal Nehru, the Hindu-dominated Congress increasingly challenged British rule in India. During the 1920s and 1930s Gandhi preached Satyagraha (“holding fast to the truth”) and asked Indians to adopt a policy of nonviolence and noncompliance with British rule. Gandhi’s protest movement gained worldwide notoriety in 1930 when he led a boycott of the British salt monopoly (see entry #20).

In 1935 Britain gave India greater local autonomy and seemed to be preparing it for self-governance. However, with the outbreak of World War II in 1939 and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and Hong Kong in 1941, Britain refused to grant India any further autonomy. Gandhi objected to this and demanded that Britain “quit India” immediately.

Although immensely popular among Hindus, Gandhi did not speak for Muslim India. When World War II ended in 1945 the spokesman for Muslim India was Muhammad Ali Jinnah, leader of the Muslim League. Jinnah supported Gandhi’s efforts to gain independence but insisted that Muslims could never live securely in a Hindu-dominated India. Muslims, insisted Jinnah, must have their own independent state of Pakistan. Jinnah’s concerns seemed validated when tensions between Muslim and Hindu exploded in several days of bloody rioting in Calcutta in August 1946. In February 1947 British Prime Minister Clement Attlee announced that Britain would leave India by June 1948 and sent Lord Louis Mountbatten to oversee independence. Mounbatten advanced the date of independence to midnight, 14 August 1947, when India would be partitioned into two states, India and Pakistan (the latter made up of two large provinces separated by more than 1,000 miles of Indian territory). Nehru would be prime minister of India, and Jinnah would be governor general of Pakistan. Throughout the summer of 1947 millions of Hindus and Sikhs (a religion combining elements of Hindu and Muslim beliefs) migrated from Pakistan to India, and millions of Muslims left India for Pakistan. More than 500,000 people were killed in the disorders and sectarian violence that accompanied independence. Independence has not brought peace. The deep antagonisms between India and Pakistan have resulted in several border clashes and three armed conflicts, in 1947–1948, 1965, and 1971, which resulted in East Pakistan gaining independence from West Pakistan and taking the name Bangladesh. In 1998 both India and Pakistan tested nuclear weapons and threatened to use them in the 1999 summer firefights over Kashmir.
Suggestions for Term Papers
1. Investigate Gandhi’s concept of Satyagraha. How important were the non-Indian influences in shaping his views on nonviolence?
2. What role did Jawaharlal Nehru play in securing independence for India?
3. Why did Muhammad Ali Jinnah demand a separate state of Pakistan? Examine the relations between Muslims and Hindus in colonial India in the 1930s and 1940s.
4. Why has the governance of the province of Kashmir been such a delicate problem for the two countries?
5. Evaluate Lord Mountbatten’s handling of the British exit from India in the summer of 1947. To what extent were the British responsible for the bloodshed that accompanied independence?
6. Why have India and Pakistan been such adversaries since gaining independence? What is the current state of the relationship?

Research Suggestions

In addition to the boldfaced items, look under the entry for “Gandhi’s Salt March, 1930” (#20). Search under Amritsar, BenazirBhutto, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Indira Gandhi, and Edwina Mountbatten (Lady Mountbatten).

SUGGESTED SOURCES

Primary Sources

De Bary, William, et al., eds. Sources of Indian Tradition. New York: Columbia University Press, 1958. Part six has key documents for 1947.

Gandhi, Mahatma. Mahatma Gandhi: Selected Political Writings. Dennis Dalton, ed. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1996. A fine collection of Gandhi’s writings prefaced by a helpful introduction to Gandhi’s thought.

Norman, Dorothy, ed. Nehru, the First Sixty Years. 2 vols. New York: John Day, 1965. Principal writings and speeches of Nehru. The second volume is focused on independence.

Secondary Sources

Ahmed, Akbar S. Jinnah, Pakistan and Islamic Identity: The Search for Saladin. London: Routledge, 1997. The most complete study available.

Brown, Judith M. Nehru. New York: Longman, 1999. A short, lucid biography with a good bibliographical essay.

Collins, Larry and Dominique Lapierre. Freedom at Midnight. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1975. A popular, well-written account of the summer of 1947.

Gilmartin, David. “Partition, Pakistan, and South Asian History: In Search of a Narrative.” Journal of Asian Studies 57 (1998): 1068–95. Good for an understanding of Muslim views on partition; contains as well an extensive bibliographical discussion of relations between the two countries.

Jalal, Ayesha. The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim League, and the Demand for Pakistan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. The most readable study of Jinnah.

Menon, Ritu, and Kamla Bhasin. Borders and Boundaries: Women in India’s Partition. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Most of the victims of the 1947 violence were women. This is a solid examination of their plight.

Mosley, Leonard. The Last Days of the British Raj. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1962. A graphic account of the summer of 1947.

Read, Anthony, and David Fisher. The Proudest Day: India’s Long Road to Independence. New York: W. W. Norton, 1997. The best study available on British rule in India. Van der Veer, Peter. Religious Nationalism: Hindus and Muslims in India. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. This study extends beyond the independence issue and provides perspective on the deep-seated religious rivalries between Hindu and Muslim.

Wolpert, Stanley. A New History of India. 6th ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. A standard history of India that gives ample coverage of the independence issue.