Warning. The following episode contains stories of extreme violence. Have you ever walked the streets of a city or town the day after a parade or some other large event took place. You may see a cleanup crew or an overflowing trash can, maybe some stray balloons, no matter how joyous the occasion may have been. The next day, those areas tend to look a little apocalyptic, but you know
they'll be as good as new in no time. Now, imagine this scenario, but instead of remnants of confetti and decorations, the streets are littered with corpses and blood is heavily drenched in the soil. Last week, you heard me talk a little bit about what happened when the people of India found out their country was going to be divided. But what about some of the events that took place
before that? Many communal fights and riots broke out, most notably on August seventeenth, ninety six, a day known as Direct Action Day. What started out as a pressure tactic against the British ended up in absolute carnage. From I Heart Radio, I'm Nehasis and this is partition a podcast that will take a closer look into this often forgotten
part of history. The idea behind Direct Action Day, an event that took place exactly a year before the boundary line was announced, came from Mohammad Ali Jinna, the future founder of Pakistan. Jinna wanted to ensure the British knew that the Muslim League wanted a separate country and the transfer of power took place. He called for all Muslims to close their shops and take part in demonstrations. However, it was never quite clear what those demonstrations should be,
and in the end, massive looting and destruction transpired. Author Nasidha Jari paints the grewsome picture in Midnight's Furies m hm m h. None the Law first noticed something was wrong when the cows sleeping in the middle of the road struggled to their feet to avoid an early morning street car. The normally packed tram that clanged past was completely empty. Nobody was heading to work instead. A half dozen trucks followed, filled with angry bearded men carrying brick
bats and bottles. For a moment, None the Law watched, frozen in place as the thugs piled out and ransacked a nearby furniture store owned by a Hindu like himself. They tossed mattresses and chairs into the street and set them on fire. Then a hill of stones came pelting up the road towards him. Law turned and left. The violence seemed to have subsided by the evening, but when
the clock struck midnight, a different story unfolded. Gangs of killers materialized, wielding machetes, torches, and even revolvers and shotguns with ruthless efficiency, they hunted down members of the opposite community. Where a lane of Muslim shanties crossed through a Hindu area, or a few threadbare hovels inhabited by Hindu families sat amid a sea of Muslim homes, the shrieking mobs woke the inhabitants, slaughtered them and set their cramped, flimsy huts alight.
The scale of the slaughter only became apparent in the daylight. Hundreds of corpses littered the streets on Saturday morning, seventeen August, and photographs they looked like mannikins, near naked and beginning to bloat, Their limbs tangled like rope. It was a kill or be killed situation. It wasn't just the Gunda's or low level criminals who are wreaking havoc, but regular
citizens as well. One horrified Britain recounted how his butcher had sliced up his order before calmly striding across the street and using the same knife to slip the throat of a Hindu passersby. These days of bloodshed have another name as well, the Great Calcutta Killings. Negotiation after negotiation took place, different iterations of plans took place, and when it looked like progress was at the end of a long and winding road, it quickly dissolved as soon as
it appeared. Jenna felt as though he was being ignored and that no one was listening to the wants and needs of the people who wanted a Muslim majority dominion Neary wanted to ensure that India wouldn't disintegrate. To shed more perspective on these riots and other aspects of partition, I spoke to David Gilmartin, a professor from North Carolina State University, to understand direct Action Day. There's a really important act to this and to Jenna's calling for protests
on that day. I mean, I think it's very important to stress that Jenna did not call for open violence on this, but there are questions about the relative responsibility of different groups for the violence that broke out, and one could certainly say, you know, Jenna is not completely free from a case that there were certain things that
he did which may have contributed to the violence. But again, what I want to stress is the backdrop to this had to do with the failure of the last major effort, through negotiations by the British and by the Indian National Congress and by the Muslim League, to produce a plan for India's independence which would keep India united as a single country and avoid a partition between two separate countries. After all my research, I kept coming back to the
same conclusion. The whims and personal agendas of men constantly got in the way when creating a well thought out solution. I asked David what he thought about this. It's one of these questions that one can argue about. But I know this is a wishy washy answer, but I come back to it kind of yes and no, because there's no doubt that individual politicians had their own agendas, and
in the riots in Calcutta, that's really clear. So I mean, a lot of the argument about that particular riot that followed Direct Action Day has to do with the role that was played by HS suro Worthy. So who was Hussaint Sahed sugar Worthy, the Chief Minister of Bengal under the Muslim League. And again there's a lot of controversy about this. You know, whether he restrained the police from moving in earlier to try to control the violence. Some
people say yes, but that's contested. Some people say no, that he didn't. But one thing is very clear, quite apart from conflict with Hindus, Sarti was a Muslim leader in Bengal whose political base was in cal cut and the partition of Bengal while it was a negative thing one could say for many Bengali Muslims and Hindus alike, but for Sarroarty the partition of Bengal would have been
political suicide. And in fact, in a certain sense it was because he had no significant political base in East Bengal, the part that ultimately went to bucket Stan. I tried very hard not to roll my eyes as David was telling me this, and I did not succeed in this task. I literally had to interject when he was speaking to Note that my iy roll was not directed towards him,
but the incredibly frustrating information I was hearing. So he continued as a prominent politician, but actually largely by shifting his focus to the national level, to the Pakistani level. So there isn't any doubt he had his own agenda in this. But the other part of your question is
can one explain what happened by this? Well? Maybe, but had there not been a leader like Sir Worthy, it's not clear that exactly the same thing wouldn't have happened, because there were very significant underlying questions that go beyond his particular agenda. I then asked where was everyone? Jenna and a Route were not physically in Calcutta, But what about the police? Why did this unrest go on for
as long as it did. The question about the role of the police and the army is in part tied to the kinds of things you're implying in your question that a lot of these political leaders had their own goals but were in a certain way not ready to sacrifice those or sacrificed their own standing to to take an active role in trying to stop the violence. I
am not naive. I understand the demand to be a politician and the complexities of having a difficult job, but behaviors like the ones David mentioned truly have me scratching my head. Is the death of our people worth political gain?
Jenna certainly did not call for violence, but there is a certain sense in which, of course, even though the evidence I've seen suggests that the Muslims in Calcutta probably suffered higher casualties than Hindus did, but largely because the Muslim population was generally poor and less able to defend itself.
But you know, the riot itself, no doubt, did make clear on a national stage that the question of coercing Muslims into any kind of arrangement that didn't take account of the Muslim demand for Pakistan was going to be a very difficult proposition, and that message actually got across, I mean, to both Congress and to the British. So I mean, in that sense one could say this did
to a certain degree served part of Jenna's purposes. Now for the British, the British governor was very wary of trying to bring the British in and to cut out the elected Chief Minister of the province at this particular time, which would have brought the British in for huge criticism, and a lot of the British actions throughout this whole period leading up to partition one can explain by efforts of the British to avoid getting blamed for, you know,
having been the cause of what happened, though of course they have been blamed, but nevertheless, you know, the idea was that they wanted to create the position, the image that this is something that different Indian groups need to work out. They're the ones who are responsible for partition. We are kind of above the fray. This is the standard kind of British argument they used to justify that
they didn't in fact maintain order above the fray. The British who made the decision to colonize us and desecrated India and its economy basically said, this is above our paygrade. Certainly, there's plenty one can say about the role of British in this whole operation, which is not to say the British weren't in a somewhat difficult situation. But on the other hand, you know, they were in charge, you know,
I mean who else was there too? I mean This is like this example that I was just gimming about what happened on direct Action Day and what followed, and you know, the the politicians, people like Sara Worthy, were under huge pressures and they did have their own agendas. But yet at the same time, you know, even if they were committed to a trying to control violence, they didn't have the means to do it that the British did.
Accountability this is a characteristic that seems to be lacking throughout many of the issues that arose before and after a partition. No one wants to claim responsibility. It's like when you see something amiss when you're walking and you don't know if help is on the way. Most people assume the problem is being taken care of and go about their day. David said it himself. The lack of confronting the violence from all sides was due to the fact that there was confusion of who exactly was in
charge at the time. There wasn't this idea of see something, say something. Direct Action day to me comes off as a fur the greater good argument that the destruction was a small price to pay in order to ensure that the politicians got the chance to get what they want. On February, the Prime Minister of Britain at the time, Clement at Lee, made a statement that the British would leave India by June of but as we all know,
that is not what happened. Like many characteristics of partition, we cannot pinpoint in exact reason why the date became August, almost an entire year earlier than expected. Was an ongoing unrest in patience, greed, and honestly probably is a combination of all these things and more. Here is another excerpt from Midnight's Furies. Mystery and misinformation still cloud the most pivotal decision in the partition process, to rush forward the
date of the British departure by ten months. Mount Batten is typically blamed for the acceleration of the handover so the British would not be held responsible for the blood bath to come. Mountbatten did himself no favors by boasting in later years that he had plucked the date out of thin air at a press conference, choosing the anniversary of the Japanese surrender, simply because it's sprang to mind.
If that were true, hundreds of thousands of dead and millions of displaced Pakistani's and Indians would indeed have been victims of one man's whimsical addicted You all may remember from last week that Lord Mountbatten was a royal representative whose job it was to oversee the separation of India. What a gentleman. On July, the British Parliament passed the Indian Independence Bill. The bill was made up of several committees to deal with different aspects of partition for the British.
Some included assets and liabilities, economic relations, and armed forces. Care to guess how many committees were created to help the people of India and Pakistan. If you guessed zero, you would be correct. Politicians took a very lazy, fair approach, after all, what could go wrong? You've heard me say that June three was the date independence was announced, but how many people actually found out on this day? Remember this was the nineties. People were not getting news alerts
and push notifications on their smartphones. While this information was on the radio and in the papers. The vast majority of residents lived in quiet, rural areas where this vital intel did not reach them. For weeks, the British hardly went door to door giving denizens an f y I. So how exactly was India going to be separated in a new country formed? Mount Batton and his team brought
in a man named Cyril Radcliffe, a lawyer. Radcliffe was literally chosen because he had absolutely no knowledge of what was happening in India. According to the British, this would allow him to do the job without a bias. To add insult to injury, Radcliffe had never been to India before. Do you think he bothered to visit the communities that would soon be split up? He didn't. Do you think
he asked the United Nations for guidance? He didn't. The United Nations was deliberately left out of the conversation to avoid any delays. Did he make sure that all of the information and plans he had for the country were updated and accurate. He didn't. No map specialists or geography professionals were involved in the making of this decision. Radcliffe created these new territories in five weeks. The fate of millions of people was left up to a man who
threw together a plan in five weeks. He left right after his task was complete, burning all of the documents before he left, or more truthfully, fled. Radcliffe wrote the following to his nephew, Nobody in India would love me for the award about the Punjab and Bengal, and there will be roughly eighty million people, with their grievance who will begin looking for me. I do not want them to find me. As Rackcliffe understood it, people were going to suffer no matter what. How nice to know we
were nothing more than collateral damage. Rackcliffe ended up not accepting his fee for the job, hardly an atonement for his sin. Naturally, when we're turning back to Britain, he received one of the highest honors from the Queen the night of the Grand Cross. You may recall my grandfather talking about how he celebrated on the street as a
teenager when independence was granted. However, the celebration and excitement was short lived because even though the British have left, the official boundary lines have yet to be made public. No one knew what land now belonged to what country. Remember, this announcement came out on auguste The borderline cuts through
Bengal in the east and Punjab in the west. And because Radcliffe made his decision on religious grounds, Muslims found themselves on the Hindu side, and Hindus found themselves on the Muslim side. Suddenly, even without moving, people were on the wrong side of the border, and just like that,
we were in a state of genocide. A passage from Yasmine Khan's The Great Partition states a whole village might be hacked to death with blunt farm instruments, or imprisoned in a barn and burned alive, or shot against walls by impromptu firing squads using machine guns. Children, the elderly, and the sick were not spared, and ritual humiliation and conversions from one faith to another occurred alongside systemic looting and robbery, clearly carried out with the intention of ruining lives.
It seems that the aim was not only to kill, but to break people over and over again. I think about these horrific facts and stories. These are stories that determined much of my life, but not once did this information come to play in my pre college education. I graduated high school in two thousand eight, fourteen years ago. I was curious to find out if others had similar experiences to me, or by some miracle, this history hasn't
been erased from textbooks. My alma mater, the University of Texas at Austin, is home to one of the most distinguished South Asian programs in the country. I interviewed two different students from UT, both of whom took an entire course devoted to partition top by professor in any chater g Did either of them know about it before taking this class? Here's what they had to say. I didn't know basically anything about partition before the class. That's Christine.
I just found the way the professor just made the past come alive and really like reinforced the idea, like that the past isn't even past. Um That made me want to take more classes. Christine observed that while some students were in this class to fulfilling requirement, others were there for a very different reason. So I was one of a handful of nonsalth Asian students in the class. So at the beginning she was like, why are you here, like asking people, and a lot of people were there
because they had never taken history classes before. They weren't even liberal arts majors. They were just wanting to explore family history or learn more about their heritage. And I was like I'm just taking a history class. I felt sort of like I was really missing something I didn't know.
I guess what the big deal at the time was, because yes, my understanding and this is from like high school history classes of partition was just kind of a natural process of the independence movement and like a byproduct of getting rid of British colonial rule was that these two states had to form like it was almost inevitable, which was something that was completely broken down in UM
the class. And one thing I come away with UM is that it was definitely not inevitable and it was a huge product of the British Rutha is a South Asian like myself. She also immigrated to the United States as a baby, so I was especially keen to know if our experiences mirrored my own. My family didn't talk about partition much, so are at all like the sentiment was, you know, Pakistan an idea at one point where the same country and then they split and now there's you know,
animosities one against the other. For me, it was just kind of like this accepted thing that had happened. There was no debate about if it was the right or wrong thing to do. There was no Um, there was. There just wasn't much like critical thought put towards it. And I think what I learned in class was this is a shared experience that people part of our generation think have and it's because that history is really painful.
A lot of people's relatives experienced it firsthand and they can speak to how it was more of an atrocity than you know, the political gain. She recalls her first time finding out about partition as a teenager. It was actually kind of funny. Um, in my ninth grade World Geography class, we talked about partition for I think like a few lessons. It was like two were three lessons, and um, the way it was talked about was so
surface level tangential. And now looking back on it after taking the classes that I have, it's almost offensive the way that it was taught, Like, you know, they were just they were just like, yeah, God, he was this wonderful person who did so much great work to bring peace to South Asia. And I just think about it now, like as if that was a big joke. If you remember from last week's episode, learning about Gandhi was also the only aspect associated with partition I was taught as well.
Dr Gunita Singhbala, founder of the Oral History Project Partition Archive, mentioned her education or lack there of, on this topic.
When we were children, the history that we were learning in school, the official history was so disconnected from folk history, and not just the history, even the news, like what we would hear on National team me at the time, there was only you know, one channel in India and Pakistan as well at the time, the Indian channel was called Dooders and um the news we would hear about the job versus what we were seeing. There was such
a disconnect. And similarly in history, the folk history that our grandparents and our communities carried and told through folklore versus um you know what we lived in school, I always knew that that gap needed rebridged and that would solve a lot of the misunderstandings, a lot of the problems we were having, a lot of the conflict that resulted in real lives lost. So that thought was in the back of my mind for a very long time.
Fast forward to high school. Um, I learned about, you know, the independence movement in India and how India freedom uh India and Pakistan and you know, the it was like a one liner in our two books. Basically, Gandhi walked to peaceful march the British left and it was like a peaceful trance for a power and I was like, well, that's just not what I heard growing up. Here's David again with his experience as an educator. Mostly the students
know very little about partition. Some I've never heard of it. Others sort of say, oh, yeah, there was something in a school textbook about that, but you know, they can't
remember very much. But but of course other students know much more about it, and particularly students who you know, as you've been describing, have some family connections to partition, and you know, their grandparents were involved in some way or they've heard about it, and so they don't know all of the details, but they do have real questions tied to it, which puts them in a somewhat different
perspective from the other students. So yeah, I mean, among the students who hadn't sort of heard at all about partition before, some get really quite interested, you know, and people of course are always amazed to discover important things in history that they ever heard of. You know. We talked about the people whose lives are affected by this event in a general sense, but for the next two episodes I will specifically talk about women and their treatment.
During Partition, I spoke to our survivor who wrote a book as a way to cope with her trauma and use the women in her life as inspiration for her characters. How was the transformation of women possible through this kind of carnage and trauma that women went through. My father till my mother's dying day would say well, you know, your mother saved our lives And I'd say how And my mother she didn't want to live through the trauma again until next week. I'm ness and this is Partition.
Partition was developed as a part of the Next Up initiative created by Anna Hosnier, Joel Monique and Median. Partition is produced by Anna Hosnier, Tricia Mukerjee and Becka Ramos. It is edited by Rory Gagan, with original score composed by Mark Hadley.