indian economic social history review 2014 sengupta 529 48

Breaking up: Dividing assets between India and Pakistan in times of Partition

Anwesha Sengupta

Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University

This article explores the process of dividing the government assets and liabilities between India and Pakistan and the method of splitting the colonial administration, bureaucracy and the army as a consequence of partition of British India in 1947. It closely studies the decisions that were taken in the Partition Council, the debates and discussions behind them and the ways of implementing them on the ground. Though we associate partition with chaos and conflict, this article shows that the representatives of both sides tried to work in an orderly manner to divide the assets and liabilities. However, what was Indian and what was Pakistani, which institution should be divided and which one was too unique for partition, became points of contestation. This article examines these debates and complicates the general understanding of the transition from the colonial to the post-colonial as entirely chaotic and contentious. It also shows how partition shaped post-colonial national imaginations in India and Pakistan.

Keywords: Partition, Partition/Separation Council, division, assets, bureaucracy

The two countries [should] thank their stars, for a vast area of potential conflict and dissatisfaction was removed from the potential arena of disputes and confrontations by discussion...to the satisfaction of both the countries.

H.M. Patel, Rites of Passage, p. 123

And so the fatal operation progressesa tragedy, a comedy and an inglorious farce.

Free Press Journal, 15 July 1947

On 3 June 1947, at a meeting with the Indian leaders, Lord Mountbatten circu-lated copies of a paper entitled The Administrative Consequences of Partition.1 It highlighted the technicalities of dividing a country. The task was massive.

1 Minutes of the Meeting of the Viceroy with the Indian Leaders, Nicholas Mansergh, The Transfer of Power 194247, p. 75.

The Indian Economic and Social History Review, 51, 4 (2014): 529548SAGE Los Angeles/London/New Delhi/Singapore/Washington DCDOI: 10.1177/0019464614550767

Acknowledgements: I am grateful to Tanika Sarkar for reading several drafts of this article. A version of this essay was presented at Mahanirban Calcutta Research Group and I acknowledge the suggestions that I received from the audience, especially from Ranabir Samaddar. I would also like to thank Debarati Bagchi, Himadri Chatterji, Ishan Mukherjee, Uponita Mukherjee, Parnisha Sarkar, Aviroop Sengupta and Kaustubh Mani Sengupta.

at INDIAN INSTITUTE OF MGMT on December 17, 2014ier.sagepub.comDownloaded from

530 / AnweshA senguptA

The Indian Economic and Social History Review, 51, 4 (2014): 529548

Creating India and Pakistan as two sovereign nation-states involved a division of governmental staff, properties, records of civil departments, armed forces, financial settlements, marking out the separate jurisdiction of the high courts and federal courts, charting out domicile policies and, of course, demarcation of boundar-ies. The Indian leaders, strangely enough, had not realised the magnitude of the job before seeing the note. As Lord Mountbatten writes, The severe shock that this gave to everyone present would have been amusing if it was not rather tragic.2 These material implications of partition, except for the process of border making,3 have largely escaped scholarly attention.4 This article is an attempt to address this gap.

I

A Partition Committee, formed on 12 June with Lord Mountbatten as the chair-man, was given the task of dividing British India. Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel and Rajendra Prasad represented the Congress on the committee while the League was represented by Liaquat Ali Khan and Abdur Rab Nishtar. To administer the endless nitty-gritty of the transfer process, 10 expert committees were formed, consisting of high-ranked bureaucrats. These committees had an equal number of Muslim and non-Muslim officers representing the interests of the two future governments. The bridge between the expert committees and the Partition Committee was con-stituted by a steering committee, with two very senior bureaucratsH.M. Patel and Muhammad Ali. Following the logic of partition, Muslim officers were chosen to look after Pakistans interests and non-Muslim civil servants represented the Indian side. These officers too conformed more or less to the politics of the time and imagined India and Pakistan as exclusive custodians of Hindu and Muslim interests respectively. As partition came closer, the Partition Committee was replaced by a Partition Council where Muhammad Ali Jinnah took the place of Nishtar.5 Nishtar and C. Rajagopalachari were to participate in the council meetings if and when one of the two regular members representing Pakistan and India was unable to attend them. An Arbitral Tribunal was also set up anticipating disputes between the two sides. At the provincial level, similar mechanisms were put in place. Departmental committees with equal numbers of representatives from both sides were appointed under the supervision of the Separation Council to tabulate

2 Viceroys Personal Report No. 8, L/PO/6/123: ff. 11421, ibid., p. 163.3 See Chatterji, The Fashioning of a Frontier; Roy, Chapter I, II, Partitioned Lives; Samaddar, The

Marginal Nation; Tan and Kudaisya, Partition and the Making of South Asian Boundaries, in The Aftermath of Partition, pp. 78100; van Schendel, The Bengal Borderland.

4 Yasmin Khan has very briefly discussed this issue. See The Great Partition, pp. 11322; also Nayanjot Lahiri has an excellent article that discusses the division of museums and archaeological collections. Lahiri, Partitioning the Past, in Marshalling the Past, pp. 13762.

5 The Partition Council came into existence on 26 June 1947. See Mansergh, Transfer of Power, p. xxxix.


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all the known assets and liabilities of their respective departments and to suggest the most reasonable basis for their allocation.6 A main committee came between these departmental committees and the Separation Council.7 It first considered the recommendations of the departmental committees and then forwarded them to the Separation Council with its own suggestions and modifications. The process of dividing assets, then, produced a multifaceted bureaucratic apparatus which, in turn, bred its own complications.

The real work of partitionthe division of assets and liabilitiesbegan in an atmosphere marked by a heightened sense of religious nationalism and aggressive communal sentiments. There wasas could be expectedwidespread public apprehension: what should be the basis of this division, which assets should be divided and what was too unique to split, how fair the entire process would be and so on. All these became the points of unending discussions and heated exchanges. The media reflected the public anxiety. If the Pakistan Times complained about the mechanism of partition in Punjab where the partition commissioner and his assistant were both non-Muslims,8 the Morning News reported on the same day: curious and fantastically absurd things are happening in Bengal, where the Muslim representation appears to be nil within the committee in charge of dividing the assets and liabilities of the Bengal government.9 The Bengal corre-spondent of the Hindustan Times, on the other hand, made the reverse allegation when he wrote: Muslim members on the Expert Committees are trying to get as much as they can.10

The bureaucrats, however, were surprisingly restrained and cooperative towards one another in their attempt to divide men and things. As H.M. Patel wrote in his memoir, there was an absence of ill-will, if not good-will among them and that made the task a little easy.11 There were good reasons for it. They were all senior bureaucrats, who had been colleagues for a number of years. They knew each other well and had generally been on friendly terms.12 They had been trained under identical rules and regulations. Moreover, they knew that any lack of coordination among them would complicate the already messy situation even further and that would only increase their own workload. As H.M. Patel wrote, he and his colleague in the Steering Committee were convinced that they had no alternative but to succeed.13 Now that partition had, after all, become a reality, both sides must have

6 West Bengal Legislative Assembly Proceedings (WBLA), 1948, Volume 2, No. 1, p. 20. 7 Ibid. 8 News dated 15 June 1947. See F. No 15(106A) FI/47, Year 1947, Finance Department, Branch

Finance, National Archives of India (NAI), New Delhi. 9 Ibid.10 Ibid.11 See, H.M. Patels Transcript, No. 90, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (NMML),

New Delhi, p. 29.12 H.M. Patel, Rites of Passage, p. 128.13 Ibid., p. 185.




also overcome much of their mutual bitterness and acrimony, which was more in evidence when the fate of division was still uncertain.

Much praise was also bestowed on Lord Mountbatten for his role in the partition council. H.M. Patel described him as a genuine neutral chairman.14 He also appreciated Jinnah and Sardar Patel for being big men, men with vision.15 As a result, he argued, the Partition Council could decide almost on every matter within the allotted time and very few items were eventually left unresolved. Even those were ultimately settled by the Steering Committee without the intervention of the Arbitral Tribunal.16 This was something like a miracle. However, as we shall see in a while, though more often than not consensus was reached, they were preceded by lengthy deliberations and heated arguments. Therefore, com-ing to a decision was not necessarily smooth. The entire process of partition was determined by these two opposing sentimentsthat of suspicion, on one hand, and cooperation, on the other.

II

Members of the Expert Committees had less than 70 days to partition the British Indian state. Within this ridiculously short span, all departmental assets and financial liabilities were to be divided. Moreover, departmental files and records were to be separated, keeping in mind the possible future requirements of both countries, and government employees were to be divided as well. Added to this, the committee members had to ensure that the necessary infrastructure was insti-tuted in both Karachi and Delhi, as well as in the provincial capitals, to run the governments. Delhi was already the capital of undivided India and a system was in place. Similarly, Calcutta too had the necessary set-up. However, the scene was very different in Karachi or in Dhaka. Karachi had so far been the provincial capital of Sindh. But the city was not equipped to become the capital of an entire country all of a sudden. The Partition Council realised that various departments under the Government of India would have to assist the Government of Pakistan

14 Ibid., p. 128.15 Ibid. 16 H.M. Patels Transcript, p. 29; it has been argued in this interview that the environment of

cooperation and mutual trust was disrupted by the outburst of communal violence in Punjab after partition. Also, while reading Patel one must remember his subject position. While he highlighted the achievements of the bureaucrats and the leaders in dividing British India amicably, he was also talking about his own efficiency and diplomatic skills. But the entire process might not have been as amicable as it seems from Patels memoir. For instance, in the provincial level, there were cases that were addressed to the Tribunalit was decided that the values of government buildings and lands in East and West Bengal would be determined for the purpose of financial adjustment between the two provinces. But the basis of valuation could not be agreed upon in the Separation Council and hence it was referred to the Arbitral Tribunal. But then, one must also recognise that the general spirit was of cooperation, otherwise dividing India would not have been possible in such a short span of time. For the case of Bengal see WBLA, 1948, V-2, N-1, p. 20.



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to establish its headquarters at Karachi from the date of transfer of power which is fast approaching.17 Assistance was required on several fronts. Karachi needed new buildings to accommodate offices and residences and building material like cement, steel, coal, sanitary and other fittings were required. Existing official and military buildings had to be repaired, telephones installed and furniture purchased for government offices and residences. Transport had to be arranged for the officers travelling from India to Karachi and a reception office set up to receive and guide the incoming officers and staff. Accommodation had to be made for the Constituent Assembly members. An accounts office was required to deal with the disburse-ment of pay and allowances of the staff arriving there, and stationery had to be provided in the offices.18 The scope of the job was impossibly vast and daunting. Lists showing the required number of furniture, mechanical equipment and differ-ent stationery items for various government offices in Pakistan and in Delhi were prepared. Existing government properties were divided, as far as possible, keeping these requirements in mind. For example, the External Affairs and Commonwealth Relations Department in undivided India had 203 typewriters. It was estimated that after partition, the workload of the Delhi office would reduce and 182 typewriters would be sufficient in the new situation.19 The rest could be sent to Pakistan. Similar lists were also prepared by the representatives of the Pakistan side. For the office of the Ministry of External Affairs and Commonwealth Relations, it was estimated that 31 pen stands, 125 paper cabinets, 16 easy chairs, 31 officers tables, 20 peon benches, among many other things, were needed.20 Officers involved in partitioning India thus had to take stock of everything: from a ceiling fan to a board pin, and then determine what should go to which side.

III

Bizarre and absolutely unexpected problems cropped up in the process of division. The Free Press Journal reported, somewhat mockingly, on 15 July 1947:

The Mayor of Karachi complains that the part of the Partition Council which deals with Railways is seriously perturbed about a misplaced locomotive which cannot be traced and without which no equitable distribution of rolling stock could be carried out. From London came the news that the charwomen and porters of the India House were seriously alarmed at the printed slips they had received which asked whether they would prefer to go to Pakistan or remain in the Indian Union. The Chief of a European Firm in Calcutta which was going to be partitioned wrote to his head office in Delhi seeking advice on the division

17 F. No: 435AD/1947; 1947, Min of EA and CR, AD Branch, NAI.18 Ibid.19 Ibid.20 Ibid.




of stationery and office furniture. He wanted to know whether office pencils should be divided into two equal halves or in a manner commensurate with the size and population of the two new Commonwealths.21

Even more amusing was a report published in The Statesman of 3 August. It talked of 60 ducks that had reached Calcutta from England in July, 1947. The Agricultural Department under Suhrawardy government had ordered these birds sometime in 1946 and they cost 250. Amidst the partition chaos, the Finance Secretary refused to pay for the ducks, questioning whether such a transaction should take place at a time when the Bengal Secretariat was trying to settle the larger financial arrangements and other intricacies between the future govern-ments of East and West Bengals. The ducks, in this context, were bound to create controversies. Who would get the ducks: the Government of West Bengal or that of East Bengal? Or, would the ducks be divided between the two and both would pay for their respective portions? Apparently inconsequential, the issue triggered off complex calculations. And the newspaper correspondent wrote, perhaps half-jokingly: While protracted Departmental inquiries continue, the neglected ducks await the result in a city warehouse.22

Dividing objects and animals, though tedious, was the least difficult of duties. It involved complicated calculations but it was also mechanical to a large extent. Far more complex and controversial was the task of separating state records in accordance with their potential relevance to India and Pakistan, as much was dependent on individual judgment here. The policy was to classify all current records of the civil departments into three categories: A files that were relevant to Pakistan only, B that were exclusively of Indias interest, and C were of common interest. Territory and religion were the major determinants in this clas-sificatory process. However, it is impossible to understand the classificatory logic in its entirety. For instance, it is beyond comprehension, why a file on the Supply of United States watches and fountain pens to P.O. Sikkim was marked as B and a file on the Supply of Umbrellas to Sikkim State was marked as C.23 People in charge of dividing the records did so in the way they imagined decolonised India and Pakistan. But not everyone imagined them in the same way, even if they were on the same side of the table. Therefore, they proposed different schemes. While 14 files of the Ministry of External Affairs and Commonwealth Relations (Central Asia branch) related to Kashmir and Gilgit were marked as A, by a department staff member and was approved of by the Deputy Secretary of the External Affairs branch of the department,24 at the last moment they were reclassified as C, as a

21 F. No. 15(106A) FI/47, 1947, Finance Department, BranchFinance- I, NAI.22 Ibid. 23 F. No. 12(3)NEF/47, year 1947, Min of EA and CR, NEF Branch (Secret), NAI.24 F. No. 693-CA/47, 1947, Min of EA and CR, CJK Branch, NAI.



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senior departmental officer wrote the following note: As Kashmir administration have not yet decided as to which dominion they are finally to join, files referred to A alone should be classified as Cin any case India should be interested in the Gilgit Affairs as three frontiers (Afghanistan, Russia and China) meet there25 Officers who classified these files as A, perhaps assumed that being a Muslim majority state, Kashmir would join Pakistan.

IV

The principle for dividing government properties and government staff could not, however, be similar. Decision-makers had to provide a space for exercis-ing individual choices when it came to human property, that is, the government employees. It was decided in the Partition Council that employees would be given the option to serve either the Government of India or the Government of Pakistan. At the provincial level of Bengal and Punjab too, they were given the same choice. The council recognised that many would find it rather difficult to make the final decision immediately. They were given the right to change their options within six months of partition, provided they had categorically mentioned in their option forms that their decisions were only provisional. Moreover, it was decided that the actual transfer of staff according to their options would be arranged over a period of time and in the meanwhile a standstill agreement should be arranged so that efficiency of the organisation may be preserved.26 Both sides gave priority to the immediate governmental needs while dividing the employees. Thus, it was decided that those among the staff of the Hajj Office in the Ministry of External Affairs had opted for Pakistan, would be released only after February 1948. The Hajj season was on. To avoid confusion, the current season of Hajj was to be administered by the Government of India.27 They realised that without minimum coordination, untangling India and Pakistan would be impossible.

Despite every attempt to divide government employees in an orderly manner, problems were manifold. In Bengal, for instance, Hindus had a pre-dominant presence in government jobs and they mostly opted to serve the new West Bengal government. Consequently, the Government of West Bengal suddenly had a large surplus of staff members who had previously been posted in different areas of the eastern part of the undivided province and who had now opted for service under the West Bengal government. Nalini Ranjan Sarkar, the first finance minister of West Bengal, confessed: owing to a limited scope for employment available at the present moment due to a substantial shrinkage of the administrative area of the Province, it has not been possible to provide useful occupations for all these

25 Ibid., note dated 5 August 1947.26 F. No. 435AD/1947; 1947, Min of EA and CR, Branch AD, NAI.27 Ibid.




persons.28 For the Government of East Pakistan, the problem was the reverse: the number of vacancies exceeded the available staff members. To add to this, someone or the other in almost every department wanted to change options after the stipulated time. It was even more confusing when some people who had previously marked their choices as final in the option forms wanted to change decisions. Mohammad Yahia was one such undecided person. He worked as a record sorter in the Imperial Record Room and had initially opted for Pakistan. But his choice was provisional and soon afterwards he expressed his desire to work for the Government of India. Within a month, however, he was convinced that he had made a wrong decision. His son-in-law and his only daughter had by then left for Pakistan and the communal situation in Delhi was fast deteriorat-ing. He wrote to the authorities requesting for permission to change his option one more time.29 The Government of Pakistan too received numerous similar requests. Around June, 1949, a number of junior assistants and orderlies took out a procession in Dhaka demanding the right to re-opt for service in West Bengal.30 Requests and protests like these were markers of tumultuous times when a deci-sion made earlier as final looked like an untenable choice soon afterwards. Such demands were hardly ever entertained, but they worsened the chaos.

There was, moreover, a lack of coordination among different departments of the government, communication gaps among officers and all sorts of unintended human errors. The lapses complicated the implementation process and made the involved individuals suffer. Take the case of Gulam Kibria for example. Kibria was an employee of the Publicity Department of the Bengal government who had opted for Pakistan. He was given a posting in Khulna, now in East Pakistan. When he reached Khulna, he was told that there was no vacancy there. Mehboob Hussain, the operator from Murshidabad in the new West Bengal, had already joined the post.31 Due to an error, both of them had been given the same posting. Kibria was then sent to the Dhaka office where he was told that since he had been posted in Khulna, he had to go back there. They assured him that Mehboob Hussain would be shifted to Chittagong. Uncertainties did not end there. He went back to Khulna only to learn that not Hussain, but he himself would join the Chittagong office, which he did finally on 5 March 1948. As he was unable to join his duties, in the meantime, he could not draw his salary for these six months.32 One can easily imagine the anxieties and the financial difficulties he had to face during his initial months in Pakistan.

28 Budget for 194849, WBLA, 1948, Volume 2, No. 1, pp. 2021.29 F. No. 15-38/48-A3, Education, BranchA3, 1948, NAI.30 F. No. 1E-34/49, Political, BranchRecords, List No. 83, Bundle No. 02, Archives and National

Library (ANL), Dhaka.31 Letter from Gulam Kibria, dated 14/10/47; F. NoPub 11T/4/ 47, Home (Political), Branch

Publicity, List No. 42, Bundle No. 18, ANL.32 Letter from Gulam Kibria, dated 8/3/48; Ibid.



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Interestingly, those who were in the Indian defence forces had far less scope for exercising choice. The Partition Council decided:

That all personnel now serving in the Armed Forces would be entitled to elect the dominion they wished to serve in subject to the condition that, a Muslim from Pakistan serving in the Armed Forces would not have the option to join the Armed Forces in the Indian Dominion and a non-Muslim from the rest of the India now serving in the Armed Forces would not have the option to join the Armed Forces of Pakistan.33

The decision overlooked several quite reasonable possibilities. What if there was a Muslim army officer from Dhaka who had not supported partition and thought of himself as an Indian? The Indian Army would no longer have a space for him. Armed forces are directly responsible for protecting the physical space of a nation-state. Potential lack of loyalty among the soldiers would be a direct threat to national security and integrity and therefore some very tangible proof of loyalty to the nation was required. This, they thought, could only come from ones religious affiliation: such was the logic of partition. Men in charge of dividing the country were ostensibly guided by a territorial notion of belonging. So, in theory, a Hindu could opt for Pakistan and a Muslim for India. But when it came to the personnel of armed forces, the liberal secular notion of belonging by personal choice collapsed: in equal measure, for both states.

Curiously, when it came to prisoners, religion mattered the least. It was decided between West Bengal and East Pakistan that prisoners will be transferred to their respective places of conviction irrespective of religion.34 Exceptions could only be made for someone if her family had already migrated to another dominion from the one where she was convicted. Therefore, say a Hindu prisoner, who was arrested in Dhaka before partition and was put inside the Alipore Jail in Calcutta, would remain there only if her family was in West Bengal. Otherwise, after parti-tion, she had to be shifted to East Pakistan, irrespective of her religion or her will. Thus, she herself could not be an Indian or a Pakistaniher nationality was either determined by state regulation or by the preferences of her immediate family. The state authorities, therefore, had little concern about the national imaginations of the prisoners, they were treated almost like inanimate objects, or may be like children whose opinion did not count.

V

Separating India and Pakistan was as difficult as unscrambling scrambled eggs, observed a columnist in the Eastern Economist:35 a nearly impossible task,

33 Patel, Rites of Passage, p. 235.34 Amrita Bazar Patrika, 4 August 1949.35 F. No. 15(106A) FI/47, 1947, Finance Department, BranchFinance-I, NAI.




especially within such a short span of time. Trade and finance were one sector where no drastic division was feasible. It was certain that in both countries there would be a considerable number of people who would be earning their income on one side but would have their families on the other side of the border. The industries of Calcutta and Bombay are sure to draw on labour recruited from East Bengal, the North West Frontier and Punjab, noted the Expert Committee.36 No longer could they be allowed to send home money without limit, but nor was it possible to impose much restrictions as that would mean unnecessary hardships for these people. Keeping these issues in mind, one opinion was to continue with the common currency system for both countries. Along with the same currency, it was also suggested that both should have a joint administration of foreign exchange assets, there should be no internal customs regulation and a unified exportimport licensing system would be shared by them.37 This was perhaps a little too much to expect from India and Pakistan. If they were willing to go for a joint currency system, they might as well have accepted the Cabinet Mission Proposal and let go of their demand for partition. Both demanded a clear break and no sphere of mutual entanglements in any sphere. But, at the same time, both realised that it was impossible to introduce separate coinage and currency immediately. The Expert Committee decided to continue with the existing coinage and currency for both India and Pakistan till 31 March 1948. The time between 1 April and 30 September (1948) was to be considered as a transitional phase when new coins and notes would be introduced in Pakistan, but the old Indian rupee and paisa would still remain valid. However, during this transitional phase, the issue of Indian coins in Pakistan territory would be very restricted and new Indian currency notes would not be issued at all.38 The idea was to phase out the common currency. However, one may note that even after the first five years of partition, Pakistani coins were circulating freely in Calcutta39 and the Reserve Bank of India notes inscribed with the words Government of Pakistan were circulating in Pakistan.40

Then there were some unique institutions like the Central Quinine Office in Calcutta, which was meant for storing and issuing of quinine. Dividing its assets would mean a division of specialised instruments and lifesaving medicines. The highly sophisticated equipment was seldom found in duplicates. Therefore, divid-ing the properties of this institution was bound to interfere with efficiency. Also, with only a portion of the assets, it would be impossible for Pakistan to build a self-sufficient institute immediately. That would only hamper the research and treatment of malaria in the entire region. From the very beginning, the Partition

36 F. No. 76(73) F1/47, Finance Department, Branch Finance-I, NAI.37 Ibid.38 Patel, Rites of Passage, p. 208.39 Amrita Bazar Patrika, 20 June 1952.40 Amrita Bazar Patrika, 19 November 1951.



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Committee recognised that in such cases division might be impracticable.41 In a meeting of the Partition Council, Lord Mountbatten brought up this issue and suggested that both India and Pakistan be given access to the facilities that such institutions offer for a stipulated period of time.42 The Partition Council agreed to this proposal. A list of such institutions was prepared and they were then divided into four categories: (a) training and higher education institutions like the Nursing College in Delhi; (b) research institutions like the Indian Forest Research Institute; (c) institutions that manufacture specialised commodities like the Central Research Institute at Kasauli where vaccines were manufactured; and (d) institutions that provide essential services like the Imperial Serologist Department where blood stains were tested. It was decided that both India and Pakistan would have access to the facilities offered by these institutions for at least three years which could be extended up to five years, provided their governments agreed to it.

Though both sides readily agreed to the idea of unique institutions, they did not fare well in the long run. We may look at the case of the Dow Hill Forest School at Kurseong, West Bengal. This was recognised as a unique institution. For four years, it was decided that the school would be open to the students of both East and West Bengal as no similar institution existed in East Pakistan. Accordingly, 19 students from East Pakistan joined the institution in October, 1947. Problems soon arose between the two governments about the disbursement of monthly allowances to students from East Pakistan. Also, the discriminatory treatment of the administration and the faculty towards them made their stay in the hostel very difficult. In the first week of December, 1947, these students left the hostel and the institute and went back to East Pakistan. Obviously, the attempt to maintain Dow Hill as a unique institution had failed. The lack of cooperation between the two governments and the attitude of the staff and the teachers were responsible for the impasse. Quite naturally, the Government of East Pakistan demanded the physical division of the assets after this fall out. Assets included library books, instruments of the laboratory and botanical and entomological specimens which were in the institutes possession.43 I do not know what finally happened to the institution and its collections. But it is clear that while implementing the partition on the ground there was much bad blood and lack of cooperation. Even though both sides realised the problem with a clean break, the political context and communal bitterness prevented them from acting on their realisation.

Executing the decisions of the Partition Council on the ground was often obstructed by overzealous government employees, party workers and common men. They always suspected the other side of getting more than its fair share. For instance,

41 Press Note, Dt. 17.6.1947, F. No. 435AD/1947; 1947, Min of EA and CR, AD Branch, NAI.42 F. No. 315-AD/47, No. 1-68,1947, Min. of EA and CR, AD Branch, NAI.43 F. No 3C1-4/51, Political, BranchCR, B Proceedings, List No. 119, Bundle No. 5, ANL.




the movement of arms and ammunition from India to Pakistan as a consequence of the division of military assets raised widespread suspicion. Public complaints were lodged with the provincial governments about arms being smuggled to Pakistan. Such complaints and the follow-up investigations slowed down the process of transfer of assets considerably.44 More fascinating was the case of Joymoni, an elephant, who belonged to the Forest Department of colonial Bengal. In the process of asset division, the value of Joymoni was determined as equivalent to that of a station wagon used by the director of Land Records and Surveys.45 West Bengal got the vehicle and East Bengal got the animal. However, at the moment of independence, Joymoni was in Malda town, which fell within West Bengal. Therefore, the elephant had to be taken to the other side of the border. The problem arose when the attendant and the mahout of Joymoni opted for India.46 Consequently, the conservator of forest in East Bengal decided to send a forest guard, a mahout and an attendant to bring over the elephant. They came to Malda in June 1948.47 But, the matter did not end there. A new dimension was added: who would pay for the maintenance of Joymoni between 15 August 1947 and June 1948? The East Bengal government should arrange the money as Joymoni was their property throughout this period, argued the Collector of Malda. A sum of Rs 1900 was claimed from the Government of East Bengal and the Forest Department employees sent by the conservator to escort the elephant were detained in Malda. District authorities of Malda had used the elephant throughout this period and therefore they should bear the expenditure, was the counter logic. Official archives are silent about the ultimate fate of Joymoni.48 The dispute moved to diplomatic circles and was probably resolved at the level of Chief Secretaries.

Politicians and bureaucrats at the top rung, in their sanitised and controlled environment, formulated policies. The general atmosphere affected them much less than the men who were closer to the ground. Senior bureaucrats operated from a somewhat external positionexternal to the larger social climate of the subcontinent that was deeply affected by the partition.49 But the execution phase involved numerous other individuals who had witnessed more closely the

44 Extract from West Bengal police Gazette Dt. 6.2.48, File No. 1085/1947, IB, West Bengal State Archives, Kolkata.

45 F. No. 3c1-6/1949; Political, BranchConfidential Report (CR), B Proceedings, Bundle No. 2, List No. 119, ANL.

46 The Government of East Bengal was informed by a memo dated 3 March 1948. Ibid.47 According to the memo dated 23 June 1948; Ibid.48 I must confess that it is possible that further information about this case is there in some file or

the other in Bangladesh National Archives but, if so, it has escaped my notice.49 I am borrowing this notion of externality of the top rung of bureaucrats from the argument of

Sudipta Kaviraj. He describes them as Nehruvian elitewho were dispersed thinly but crucially throughout the governmental and modern sectors. See Kaviraj, On State, Society, Discourse in India, in James Manor, Rethinking Third World Politics, p. 85.



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unfolding of partition politics and who were moulded by it. The bitterness of the times affected the government officials, especially those who were in the lower rungs and did not participate in the planning process but were responsible for executing the Partition/Separation Council decisions. Their vernacular everyday discourses were shaped by the popular aggressive logic of right wing national-ism and the events that were taking place in various rural and urban centres of the subcontinent, where they were located.50 Their own imagination and passionate ideas about nations and nation-states, and their understanding of the meaning of partition made it difficult to put into practice many of the decisions of the Partition Council or the Separation Council.

VI

We must not, however, think that bureaucrats were unanimous at every stage of decision-making. They often bargained hard. More often than not they agreed to disagree and the particular case was then referred to the Expert Committee, and from there to the Steering Committee and the Partition Council for a final decision. For instance, D.M. Sen, Indian representative from the Department of Education, and his departmental colleague K.M. Asadullah, representing Pakistan, had conflicting opinions regarding the legal status of certain institutions like the Indian Museum in Calcutta and The Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal. Sen argued that the museum was governed by an autonomous board of trustees and the Asiatic Society was under an autonomous society. Neither of them, therefore, was government property. These institutions, therefore, should remain outside the partition process. Asadullah, on the other hand, refused to buy this argument. His point was that the Indian Museum had been financially maintained by the Imperial government51 and the [Asiatic] Society itself in its letter dated the 19th April 1943 has admitted that the manuscripts belong to the Government of India.52 He proposed a joint administration for the Indian Museum. For the Asiatic Society Library, he suggested that the Government of Pakistan should have property rights over the Arabic and Persian manuscripts housed there and it would be open to the Pakistan Dominion to take them back if and when necessary and ask for the loan of any of them either for their own use or for that of any research worker belonging to the Dominion.53

The SenAsadullah dispute became even more acute when they fought pas-sionately over the collection of the Imperial Library, known today as the National Library of India. Sen argued that the library could not be categorised as an asset for the purpose of division.54 According to the Government of India Notification

50 Ibid., p. 90.51 Annexure No. III, F. No 15-48/48-A3, 1948, Department of Education, Branch A3, NAI.52 Annexure No. VI, Ibid.53 Ibid.54 Annexure No. I, Ibid.




No. 201/207 of 30 January 1903, the Imperial Library was a library of reference, a working place for students, and a repository of material for the future historians of India, in which, so far as possible, every work written about India at any time could be seen and read.55 Sen argued that the purpose of the library would be lost if the collection could not be retained intact for the use of the historians and the research scholars. Since the collection was about India, it had to remain in Indiathat was his argument. What he conveniently overlooked, however, was that when the regulation had been formulated, India signified an undivided sub-continent. Partition changed this meaning. And the Imperial Library obviously had books that were relevant for studying the territories that were to go to Pakistan after partition. Therefore, Pakistan could also have a logical claim to it arguing that they were necessary for understanding Pakistan. Moreover, the library certainly had books on Islam and Islamic history which, in accordance to the logic of partition, Pakistan could certainly claim. In other words, Asadullah could have argued that the library belonged as much to the Pakistan nation-state as to India. In his note, he rightly mentioned that Pakistan needed a well equipped and up-to-date library as much as India did.

But Sen had the usual legal angle to his argument. The Metcalfe Hall, which housed the Imperial Library till independence, had been purchased from two soci-eties: the Agricultural and Horticultural Society of India and the Calcutta Public Library. The entire collection of the Calcutta Public Library, too, had been handed over to the Imperial Library. Sen pointed out that the indenture of 20th December 1901 executed by the Calcutta Public Library in favour of Government confers rights regarding the portion of the library taken over from that society...on the Proprietors of the Society.56 Therefore, the Government of India had no rights to transfer the collection from Calcutta. Moreover, according to an agreement dated 22 August 1904, a certain Bohar family had donated a collection of oriental books and manuscripts to the library on condition that the collection would never be taken out of Calcutta. These agreements would be violated in case of a division of the collection, argued Sen. Asadullah, on the other hand, pointed out that ever since the capital of British India had been shifted from Calcutta to Delhi, the Govern-ment of India had frequently considered the question of transferring the library to the new capital city. Legally too, he pointed out, there was no difficulty in shifting the collection or some part of it away from Calcutta. He showed that according to the agreement with Calcutta Public Library, it was obligatory to retain the library in Calcutta as long as any of the society members of the Calcutta Public Library was alive and in Calcutta. However, It is unlikely that any of the said members would be alive now, wrote Asadullah in his report.57 Therefore

55 Ibid. 56 Ibid.57 Annexure II, Ibid.



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moving the library from Calcutta as a whole or in part should not be a problem. Ultimately, however, Asadullahs demands were not satisfied and the Imperial Library remained in Calcutta with its entire collection. So did the Asiatic Society and the National Museum.

The non-current (that is, historical) records kept in the Imperial Records Department (to be called the National Archives of India after independence), also escaped the brunt of partition. It was decided that the records would remain in Delhi, but microfilm copies may be supplied on demand to the Government of Pakistan.58 Though this was the established international norm, given the bitter-ness that the communal riots had created in the sub-continent, no one would have been surprised if the historical records were divided between the two dominions. R.B Ramsbotham, one of the earliest members of the Indian Historical Records Commission, therefore wrote: I congratulate the authorities of both of Pakistan and of India on their wise and scholarly decision not to separate the archives: by keeping them intact, in spite of severe temptation otherwise, they have set an example to the whole civilised world.59

As India retained the colonial records, the Asiatic Society and the Imperial Library collections, it remained the principal custodian of the subcontinents colonial and pre-colonial past. In this light, 1947 was not a moment of birth of two new nations for the Indian nationalist discourse: rather, it marked the transition from a colonial phase to a post-colonial one when a part of the territory merely broke away. The Pakistan movement and the subsequent creation of that country was projected as secession from the unified state-space of India. Pakistani nationalist scholars, on the other hand, have lamented that the lack of access to many Islamic institutions, libraries, publishing houses and research centres have prevented them in their task of writing national history.60

Partition, however, disrupted Indian nationalist claims over the pre-historic sites of Indus Valley as all the major sites of this civilisation fell within the boundaries of Pakistan. The remains of the Indus Valley Civilisation had been excavated in

58 Indian Historical Records Commission: A Retrospect 19191948, pp. 8889.59 Ibid., p. 78.60 Many of the major Islamic Institutions were in some of the provinces which were not partitioned.

Their possessions were not divided. Also, non-governmental institutes did not fall within the purview of the Partition Council. As a consequence, Dar-ul-Ulm of Deoband, Khuda Baksh Oriental Library in Bankipur (Bihar), Islamia College (Calcutta), Nawal Kishore Press (Lucknow) and Salar Jung Museum in Hyderabad retained their collections in India. See Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali, A Rite of Passage: The Partition of History and the Dawn of Pakistan, in Tan and Kudaisya (ed.), Partition and Post-Colonial South Asia, p. 146. One may mention here that all the moveable properties of Calcutta Madrasah, including the books and the manuscripts, however, were shifted to Dhaka in accordance to the decision of the Separation Council. The Bengal Madrasah Education Board also shifted to Dhaka, leaving behind a number of High Madrasahs and the Hooghly Islamic Intermediate College, without any central organisation for their control and coordination. See Md. Maniruzzaman, kolkata Madrasah-er 205 Bachhor (no pagination) in Madrasah College: Bicentenary Celebration Souvenir.




the early 1920s. Since then, Indias past had been traced back to the Indus Valley Civilisation. Jawaharlal Nehru wrote in the early 1940s:

I stood on a mound of Mohenjo-Daro in the Indus Valleyand all around me lay the houses and streets of this ancient city that is said to have existed over five thousand years ago; and even then it [India] was an old and well developed civilisationAstonishing thought: that any culture or civilisation should have this continuity for five or six thousand years or more.61

Partition troubled this grand imagination. The project of nationalist history writing in India could not afford to let go of the Indus Valley Civilisation as the originary moment of the countrys history. So, India fought tooth and nail and managed to get half of the exhibits of the Lahore Museum that included certain artefacts from Mohenjo-Daro and from the Buddhist site of Taxila. To ensure a fair division, certain objects like two gold necklaces from Taxila, one carnelian and copper girdle from Mohenjo-Daro and a necklace made up of jade beads, gold discs and semi-precious stones from Mohenjo-Daro were deliberately frag-mented. In the words of Nayanjot Lahiri, the integrity of these objects were compromised in the name of equitable division.62 Postal stamps in the Indian archaeological series that were issued in 1949 had the imprint of the legendary Mohenjo-Daro bull. In the earlier archaeological series of stamps, there was an imprint of the famous Konark Horse which was now replaced by the bull.63 The Konark temple of Orissa was indisputably Indian, but appropriating Mohenjo-Daro was far more important. Parallel to this, there was an organised attempt to discover Indus Valley Civilisation sites on the Indian side of the border, immediately after partition.64 The Archaeological Survey of India tried to compensate for the loss of the original sites, Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro, to Pakistan, with new discoveries within India. A 17-minute black-and-white film, A Century of Indian Archaeology (1961), produced by the Film Division of India, for instance, tried to locate the Indus Valley Civilisation within the territorial limits of post-colonial India. As Sraman Mukherjee writes, The moving footage from excavations at Ropar and Kalibangan fades into a post-1947 territorial map of India to narrate how the Indus civilisation extended beyond the territorial limits of West Pakistan to the Gangetic heartlandthe territorial core of the postcolonial nation.65 Similarly, there have been constant efforts to argue that the Indus Valley Civilisation was a part of

61 Nehru, The Discovery of India, p. 50.62 Lahiri, Partitioning the Past, Marshalling the Past, p. 157.63 Amrita Bazar Patrika, 10 July 1949.64 Thapar, The History Debate in School Textbooks in India: A Personal Memoir.65 Mukherjee, Being and Becoming Indian: The Nation in Archaeology, p. 224.



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Vedic culture.66 It will be interesting to study how historians and archaeologists of India and Pakistan dealt with these anxieties and the new tropes of nationalist histories that were devised after partition. However, that is a different project and this article does not have the space or scope to address these concerns.

VII

Joya Chatterji, in a recent article, has argued that in the very months that the sub-continent was engulfed in religious and sectarian conflict, significant steps were taken by both countries to produce a common statecraft.67 The bureaucrats and the ministers of both India and Pakistan, or the agents of the state, more often than not, put the interests of the state above the interests of their (religious) com-munity and nation.68 Though Indo-Pakistan relation remained conflict-ridden, there were very significant areas of agreement between the two sides.69 This article, in a way, makes a similar point. In the most obvious level, it argues, that the bureaucrats and the top rung leaders had a very pragmatic, rational and methodical approach while they were dividing the country. Religious considerations remained important in the entire process. But religion became almost a tool of governance used dispassionately to classify the men and things. Thus it complicates our common understanding of the partition process where we associate partition with commu-nalism, mass migration, mob violence in the name of religion and a colonial state seemingly indifferent to or complicit with violence: in brief, with complete chaos.

Undoubtedly, this article talks of a time when passions ran high. The bitterness of the moment continues to linger on and shape much of the contemporary polity of the subcontinent. But the times had the potential for a very different future as well. The ideas of unique institutions and joint currencies held the promise of a future of cooperation.

The division of assets in its planning and implementation was shaped by the perceptions that the bureaucrats and the Partition/Separation Council members had of India and Pakistan. Possible material requirements of both the nation-states

66 Going through the proceedings of Indian History Congress, one gets a glimpse of this anxi-ety regarding the loss of Indus Valley Civilisation. In the years following partition, there had been sustained effort to connect this civilisation with Vedic Culture, claiming the inhabitants of the Indus Valley were Aryans and worshipped Hindu gods and goddesses. Some other scholars have traced back Jainism to Indus Civilisation. See, the papers of Swami Sankarananda presented in 1953, 1954 and 1957 (The Indus People Speak, p. 127, The Great Bath Mystery, p. 104, Phallic Emblems of the Indus Valley, pp. 3235), Kamta Prasad Jain (1947) (Mohenjodaro antiquities and Jainism, pp. 11318), Ramprasad Majumdar (Mohenjodaro and Vedic Culture) and Basanta Kumar Chattopadhyay (Mohenjo Daro Civilization) (both in 1955). Similarly, in the proceedings of Pakistan History Congress, I found one paper that claimed that the Indus peoples were originally from Arabia. See, Rashid, Fertile Crescent and the Upper Indus Valley, pp. 7786.

67 Chatterji, Secularisations and Partition Emergencies, p. 42.68 Ibid., p. 49.69 Ibid.




were kept in mind. The process was as much about division as about procurement of assets. In other words, this article revisits the story of the making of two new nation-states as much as it talks about the partition of an existing state-structure. But building the future nation-state was not only about dividing chairs and tables, putting up necessary infrastructure and financial stock taking. It was a larger ideo-logical process. Therefore, the past became a site of contestation at this juncture. What constituted Indias past and what was a part of Pakistans history gave rise to controversies. At a moment of an unprecedented transition, people came up with diverse ideas about the relevance of de-colonisation, partition and indepen-dence. Hence, their imaginations of the past too differed, even if they were on the same side. As a consequence, debates and disputes arose like the one regarding the division of the Imperial Library collection or that with the classification of government files. Similarly, though government officials agreed to divide the Mohenjo-Daro artefacts kept in the Lahore Museum equally between the two countries, the discomfort and the anxieties of the Indian state and the nationalist elite were very palpable. The state, as a result, never appears to be an abstract monolithic category but seems more like a complex multi-layered mechanism comprising men with diverse visions, opinions and biases.

The article also argues against the tendency of treating state and society as two autonomous sites. There was never an enclosed, well defined site of state, where the bureaucrats operated in a robotic manner making decisions and executing orders: a site of effective governance. And, in sharp contrast, a realm of societythe site of disorder and the multitude, which desperately needed state intervention to get back on its feet. Societal forces often influenced, if not moulded, actions of the individuals who were responsible for deciding on and implementing the division on the ground.70 The failure of the unique institution or the case of Joymoni show how these two sites overlapped and influenced each other. The larger society must have had read the act of the collector of Malda or the instance of Dow Hill as the position of the Indian nation-state. Incidents like these in a communally fraught milieu formed their perceptions of the post-colonial state and partitioned times.71

Finally, the article underlines the contingent and ad hoc manner in which the partition decision was made material. Once the decision to divide was made, the

70 Recent anthropological works on state confirm this point. For instance, C.J. Fuller and Veronique Benei write in the introduction of their edited volume The Everyday State and Society in Modern India: the state is not a discrete, monolithic entity acting impersonally over, above or outside society. Rather the sarkarindifferently state and government in the commonest Indian vernacular term for themappears on many levels and in many centres, and its lower echelons at least are always staffed by people with whom some kind of social relationship can or could exist; the faceless bureaucrats actually do have faces. The boundary between the state and society, therefore, is not only unclear; it is also fluid and negotiable according to social context and position. See, Fuller and Benei, The Everyday State and Society, p. 15.

71 Partitioned times is a phrase coined by Ranabir Samaddar in his article, The Last Hurrah that Continues, in Deschaumes and Ivekovic, Divided Countries, Separated Cities.



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process of division began to develop its own logic. Or, rather, many logics, governed by the nature of each sphere affected by partition. The logic overlapped, clashed or met to form a consensus. They complicate our thinking about two well-formed nation-states in binary opposition to each other. Research on territories has already uncovered this. Work on division of assets adds weight to that perspective.

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