The Great Divide

It may seem irrelevant to be concerned with events of the last century in these turbulent times, however even a cursory glance at history will show that many of the issues and problems that confront us today have their roots in the historical events and national influences that gave birth to the countries of South Asia.

Fortunately there is no dearth of books in this field. The British have been prodigiously prolific and innumerable books have been written by British novelists, historians, biographers, political analysts and constitutional experts about the complex love-hate affair between Britain and South Asia. Indians have also written copiously on the subject but the Pakistani output in English or translated into English has been comparatively meagre and certainly there is not enough writing by Bangladeshi authors to add our own perspective to these issues.

It is important to do so for the sake of posterity because as H.V. Hodson writes in THE GREAT DIVIDE (pub: Hutchinson & Co., 1969), "every historian, however impartial and careful of the truth, as I have tried to be, must have a personal point of view without which history is anemic, and my viewpoint cannot but be British; and only an Indian or a Pakistani could write from the viewpoint of his own people and leaders." This is more than ever true of the viewpoint of a country like Bangladesh which has its own unique perspective on the events that led to the creation of the sovereign states of India and Pakistan and eventually to its own birth.

Therefore I, for one, eagerly await the publication of Mr. K.Z. Islam's Magnus Opus which I understand is in the offing. From the glimpses that we have had of his work in the weekly Holiday, which is serialising the book, I am sure that it will be a comprehensive account from the unique Bangladesh perspective and will become an authoritative text not merely for historical but also for political and constitutional studies of the period.

In the meantime I find Hodson's book one of the most comprehensive on the subject, because of the intimate insight that Hodson had into the complexities of Indian politics and the great issues involved. As Constitutional Advisor to the Viceroy, Lord Linlithgow, he knew personally most of the actors in the drama -- successive Viceroys, Mohamed Ali Jinnah, M.K.Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru et al as well as the brilliant administrators both British and Indian, such as Alan Campbell-Johnson and V.P. Menon, who actually presided over the immense task of vivisection. He also had the unique advantage of the unrestricted use of Lord Mountbatten's India papers including his personal reports to the King as well as the papers of Sir Stafford Cripps and Lord Ismay. Thus he was able, not merely to record history but also, to render an impartial assessment of the impact of the Divide.

His conclusions and answers to the hard questions that were asked in the aftermath of the bloodbath that followed Partition have a hard bedrock of fact. Was the Partition of India inevitable? How and why did it become so and what were its consequences for the Bengal that was to become Bangladesh only twenty four years later?

According to Hodson, because of the natural evolution of empire and the development of political and public opinion along liberal lines in Britain and the Western world, over time British Policy in India had progressed to the point of acknowledging that self-rule or independence would have to come. However, the catch was the game that the British played with the two largest religious communities that dominated the scene. It becomes evident that their policy tacitly, and even in some cases clearly, stated that "self-government" meant taking into account not only what was perceived as the "backwardness" of the masses but also of the divisions of its communities and castes. There is thus, no doubt that Hindu-Muslim and other internecine conflicts were used as practical aids to imperial government and to perpetuate British rule in India.

The Partition of Bengal in 1905 is a good example of how under an apparently sincere guise of administrative reform the British decided to divide Bengal into Muslim and Hindu halves. Sir Herbert Risley wrote in a government paper "One of our main objects is to split up and weaken a solid body of opponents to our rule. Bengal divided will pull different ways. Bengal united is a power".

My own opinion is that the rich and complex mosaic of cultural diversities that is the South Asian sub-continent is too various to perceive of the idea of India as a distinct geographical entity. History shows us that, even in periods of imperial consolidation, empire builders in South Asia generally aspired to a loose form of hegemony over various constituent units. The British, when they took over, did not really change the equation because they defined the unity solely in terms of the centralised institutions and structures of the Raj; therefore dismemberment was inevitable as was the eventual birth of Bangladesh.

Hodson bears out this view because, in an Epilogue added in 1985, he takes the narrative forward through the bitter vicissitudes of the crucial and formative years that followed Partiton, ending finally with the truncation of Pakistan and the birth of Bangladesh. He observes that "The Islamic faith apart, their social cultures, economic interests and political traditions were so widely different that there was ............an inherent incongruity in East and West Pakistan as parts of a single nation." He goes on to say that, "Nothing in human affairs is certainly predictable, but if in retrospect the partition of British India appears to have been inevitable so too does the re-partition of Pakistan".

Hodson's account of the deliberations, decisions and sequence of events that culminated at midnight on 14th August 1947 is meticulously detailed and scrupulously objective in so far as it was possible for him to be so. For anyone wishing to read a comprehensive and easily digested review of the subject The Great Divide can serve as a principal source.

Yasmeen Murshed is a full-time bookworn and a part-time educationist. She is also the founder of Scholastica School.