It’s recently become a trope to claim that British-Asians have been kept ignorant of their history, because of some neo-colonial plot to suppress it across society. This is being claimed of partition now, on its 75th anniversary, just as it was claimed of Bangladeshi independence on its 50th anniversary earlier this year.
It reflects what seems to me a very white misapprehension, an anxiety about being unmoored from history, when, if anything, we remember too well, so mired are we in the quagmire of the past. Many activists nevertheless aim to rectify this supposed historical ignorance. They include the Partition Education Group, which lobbies for reforms to the National Curriculum — in which “Indian Independence” is already a listed topic with the same status as the two world wars.
The real motivation behind this trend is not so much historical understanding as historical revisionism. The desire is not merely to raise awareness, but to flip the narrative. There’s an attempt to entrench partition, and its sequel, the independence of Bangladesh in 1971 (decades after the British had left) in the now ubiquitous discourse around the evils of the British Empire. The idea can be summed up by the headline of the Guardian’s double-page spread on partition a few days ago: “The British Raj caused the bloodshed”.
I am the last person to defend an empire which inflicted such spiritual degradation on my forebears. But there is a moral evasion involved which must be called out.
The narrative now being peddled — that partition was a colonial imposition — is a sham. India’s representatives themselves decided to partition the land. A ruthless campaign by Mohammed Ali Jinnah, champion of India’s Muslims, had demonstrated that his co-religionists would not risk living as a minority in a Hindu-majority state. The leaders of the Hindu-dominated Indian National Congress, of the Sikh community and of the ‘untouchable’ Dalit community all agreed an undivided India was no longer viable. In creating two independent states to replace its former colony, all Britain did was assent — in reprehensible haste — to the will of the subcontinent’s own anointed ones.
The canonisation in popular culture of this counterfactual narrative of colonial guilt was reflected recently in the television series Ms. Marvel, about a Pakistani-American superhero. Partition is described in the show as “a consequence of a century-long British strategy of divide and rule.” It is in fact a matter of record that the then Prime Minister Clement Attlee’s instruction to Lord Mountbatten was to keep India united. The classicists who earlier governed India were known to invoke the Roman principle of divide et impera, but the truth is that the British Raj paradoxically united Hindus and Muslims — as never before in history — in opposition to it. It was only when the post-British future loomed, that the older enmities reasserted themselves and Gandhi’s harmonious vision began to collapse.
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