Some wounds never heal

Raaja Bhasin

A few days back, I briefly attended a seminar at Shimla’s St. Bede’s College on the Partition of India. The organisers had asked me to make the opening remarks before the academic session began and for this draw on stories from my own family. What I did not realise, when I set out to speak, was how those 10 minutes before the mike would not just cut close to the bone, they would suck at the very marrow.  

For those of us who belong to the first-generation post-Partition, this is something that is still very close to our own being. Whenever the survivors — my parents, aunts and uncles — talked, they spoke in hushed tones and stopped talking when we came near. The horrors were too much. They never spoke of the year 1947 as the year of freedom; they referred to it as the year of Partition. That event overshadowed everything else that may have happened that fateful year. In more ways than one, those survivors wondered what happened, why it happened and who was responsible. There were no satisfactory answers. 

Barney White-Spunner seems an unlikely person to write on India’s Partition (But then so are many others). As a military historian, his work has revolved around Britain and its army — a book on the battle of Waterloo and another on the Household Cavalry. As a soldier, he has served in various parts of the world; he commanded troops in Kabul just after 9/11 and as a lieutenant-general, commanded in Basra in 2008. Not surprisingly, he handles the subject of Partition as a military campaign. The systematic structure is that of one.

The chapters follow each month of that fateful year, January to December, 1947. Within each month and in each chapter is a throwback to a past event or moment that lent shape to the time at hand. All the familiar names — Gandhi, Nehru, Mountbatten, Jinnah ... — are there. But this time the role of another player, Commander-in-Chief of the Indian Army, Claude Auchinleck, largely ignored by most historians, is placed before us. His army, perhaps the only institution capable of retaining the order in chaos and mayhem was not used. He, too, was kept out of most discussions. 

The result was yet another holocaust in that decade of holocausts. A million people lost their lives and human life seemed to have no worth. The indications of an impending tragedy were already there decades before, but no one was able to read the signs.      

A very readable account, but White-Spunner seems to have rushed to get the book into press. There are simple mistakes that could have been avoided. For example, when he refers to the Viceroy’s palace — where the future Viceroy, Louis Mountbatten proposed to Edwina — it is clear that he means Rashtrapati Bhavan. A little attention to dates would have shown that the palace in question was still a thing of the future. Mountbatten proposed to Edwina inside what now is the office of the Vice-Chancellor of Delhi University.