Introduction
Partition narratives recorded in the wake of the transition of power in 1947 envelop the period in terms of personal experience. Men and women who bore witness to the state change, and its accompanying violence, recorded their experiences in memoirs, often processing this information in such a way as to attempt to come to terms with the shock of what had happened, as well as potentially releasing their lingering feelings of guilt for their involvement. Recent scholarship has extended understanding of the change from being ‘subjects’ to ‘citizens’, and offers a more universal picture of what ‘transfer of power’ really meant for individuals.Footnote 1 Although the emerging narratives are fragmented by the trauma of partition experiences, they nonetheless offer the historian an insight into the memorialization used within communities to come to terms with the grim events of the partition period. For one group, however, the historian's image remains relatively faceless. Although the Indian Civil Service (ICS) warrants substantial coverage as a bureaucratic organization, and as a site for the examination of late colonial imperial mentalities,Footnote 2 the personal face of individual administrators at district level has been surprisingly neglected around the specific period of independence and partition. Scholarship covering the early twentieth century puts a face to district administration, in terms of the male civil servants’ backgrounds and approaches on arrival in the subcontinent.Footnote 3 As for the subjects of the colonial regime, however, the transfer of power in 1947 had more than a professional impact on its administrative officers. In tracing this, civil service memoirs are an invaluable resource,Footnote 4 but one which inevitably presents a narrativization structured around the efforts of these men to cope with their experiences and adapt to dramatic change in their personal and professional lives. These narratives may in themselves offer the historian an understanding of partition exactly through how it is accounted: the silences and shapes of recounted memories offer the reader an insight into how the unspeakable is coded into individual narratives.Footnote 5 The suffering of British civil servants in this context is obviously not comparable with that of the people truly bound up in the violence and fate of the subcontinent, and rather is founded in feelings of guilt, abrupt discontinuity of professional and personal life, and the horror of the ambivalently placed witness. Although not really victims, these men are nonetheless an important voice to the cultural or social historian in the light of recent scholarship.
Butalia's approach is an enlightening one for the partition historian. When considering her research, she writes,
and words are, after all, all we have. One of the things that I found in the course of my interviews and research was that people struggled to describe what they had been through at partition, and often ended by saying what they had seen was indescribable.Footnote 6
Butalia wrestled in her account with the question of how far it was ethical to push interviewees to describe their experiences in detail, but also with this more fundamental truth about the history of trauma: for her subjects, it was not necessarily an unwillingness to discuss what had happened that held her back, but rather their inability to express a ‘true’ account. Instead what she consistently encountered were the rehearsed memorializations of people's suffering: their accustomed recounting of trauma in words which shaped the memories they had chosen to retain. This is exemplified by the remarkably homogenous response elicited by questioning a Sikh community living in New Delhi about their female relatives’ deaths in 1947.Footnote 7 Although in many cases it was the women's own fathers, brothers and husbands who performed the killing for the sake of the women's—and the community's—honour, the memorialization of this event is consistently one that uses the terminology of the women having ‘martyred’ themselves.Footnote 8 A similar phenomenon is noticeable in Ishtiaq Ahmed's collection of first-hand accounts of forced migrants from Lahore, where the narratives are shaped strongly around an argument about who was at fault for the violence and thus focus in a disjointed way on particular details of their partition experience.Footnote 9 As Butalia comments, ‘for the community of survivors, the remembrance ritual works at many levels. It helps keep the memory alive, and at the same time it helps them forget. They remember, selectively, in order to forget’.Footnote 10 Another effect of these practised narratives is highlighted by Ananya Kabir.Footnote 11 Commenting on survivor testimonies, she writes ‘the quasi-astrological language emphasizes the inexplicability of the events leading up to Partition, while exonerating “the masses” from the mutual violence which accompanied it’.Footnote 12 This effect in first-hand accounts is also one that Ian Talbot notes in the historiography, observing,
official histories have made the violence ‘non-narratable’. They have achieved this by firstly reducing it to a ‘local’ detail that is irrelevant to the wider event of national independence and secondly by portraying it as an aberration, arising from a temporary moment of madness that does not require rational explanation.Footnote 13
The fundamental question, here, is to what extent we can really know an event like partition. Where personal destruction and loss is so widespread in a historical event, is it actually possible to reach any real ‘account’ or ‘truth’? Butalia's approach to this issue is not as in dealing with a problem, but rather as an enrichment of what the book is able to offer: when using these memorializations, presented by the subject, it is in their silences that her material is richest. For the historian of partition then, the way in which memories are recorded and communicated is perhaps the most significant part of the story. Partition cannot be recounted as a dry series of events when considered at a personal level, but rather than this being a weakness of the subject's discussion, it is in these limitations of the sources that their value lies. What civil servants chose to remember and record—and what they chose not to—narrates the experience of tragedy. The very way in which the life-changing events are written is a process in coming to terms with them, and representing the past so as to understand its impact upon personal life and identity. Whilst these sources have tended to be considered as ‘official’ or ‘distanced’ accounts, they are in fact just as personal as Indian ones in many important respects.
The nature of source material available to consider the British perspective is such that a reading of how collective memory has evolved is perhaps the most valid response to previous approaches. The Raj fervour material of the 1980s—Charles Allen's Plain Tales books, Kipling and The Jewel in the Crown—offer the most pervasive public imagery of the working empire.Footnote 14 This romanticization of Raj culture has acted as a public backdrop to the development of critical analysis of Anglo-Indian society,Footnote 15 as offered in the work of Cohn, Collingham and Dewey.Footnote 16 The memoirs on which romanticized Raj writing have been based, however, remain a valuable and relatively untapped analytic source in considering local memories of state transformation. What perhaps comes across as a weakness of memoir sources from coffee table accounts and popular history, is equally suffused with the capability of shedding light on how civil servants interpreted and committed to memory their role in the disintegrating local state. By considering the way in which these men memorialized their experiences, these sources can be used to provide a new angle on the Punjabi partition and transfer of power. In doing so, the memoirs of district officers may be fitted into the wider historiography of Anglo-India, and also in the wider historiography of partition and the postcolonial state. In particular, this paper seeks to demonstrate how the importance of prestige and the performative state, as represented by Cohn, was described as operating at the point of crisis, the transition from acting out ‘Britishness’ and the prestige of rule, to leaving one's district.Footnote 17 In these men's representations lies an intimate angle on the local state's operation in its final months. As a result, it is possible to discover from the limitations of the testimonies and from the narratives adopted, what ‘transfer of power’ meant to district officers in terms of their loss of status, disillusionment with the changes to a status quo in which they had more than a professional investment, and the unspoken pain of experiencing violence from a position of altered status.
Although planned for and anticipated, the transfer of power to India and the new state of Pakistan in August 1947 occurred sooner, quicker and with an accompanying violence for which many in the ICS, like all other Punjabis, had not felt prepared. In the Punjab, the breakdown of state control into violence was shocking and frustrating for the men whose professional lives had been spent in maintaining the status quo, and the partition a failure of everything which the administration had sought to achieve. This paper will focus on the experiences of British civil servants in the transfer period of 1946–1947 to assess the attitude of those involved at the local level to the British withdrawal from northern India. The men considered all worked as district officers in the Punjab in the closing years of British control of the province, and had not only an intimate role in the years preceding partition but a local view of the changes taking place in 1947. Their memoirs offer an insight into their memories and reflections of 1940s colonial Punjab, which provides a vital link in understanding the reality of the transfer of power, how it was achieved, what ‘transfer’ and ‘loss’ of power really meant in this context, and above all what official mentality survived at the local level at this stage. In breaking down these categories, this paper will look at three key areas.
First, the fundamental alteration in British experience of 1946–1947 lay in the perceived change from omnipotence within the district to being rendered relatively powerless. The increasing awareness of their limitations will be charted through the records of several memoirs, as the basis of the transition in attitudes which underlay the national changes of independence and partition. The second section will focus on incidents of communal violence. The memoirs paint a uniform image of a communally peaceable wartime Punjab, with 1946–1947 marking a striking change in local relations between the religious communities. The reliability of this narrative of sudden communal breakdown will be considered, and the case examined alongside other accounts of communalism in 1940s Punjab.Footnote 18 Descriptions of violence will be isolated as case studies of the state role and its power at the point of transition. Finally, the question of what the transfer of power realistically meant will be considered, who was in power at each point in time, how much control they were actually able to exercise, and what ‘the state’ meant at local level during the transition between 1946–1947.
The ‘loss’ of power
The province of Punjab had a history of unrivalled status in British India, created by a British colonial discourse but in constant interaction with elements accepted or imposed by Indian conceptions of the discourse of rule.Footnote 19 Loyal during the 1857 mutiny, the province became the core recruiting ground for the British Indian army. By the end of World War I, Punjabis had made up 400,000 of the 563,091-strong Indian army,Footnote 20 and in 1939, the Unionist Government again declared their willingness to cooperate with the war effort.Footnote 21 The late nineteenth-century racial imagery invoked to describe and justify this special status of Punjabis lent the province a mythic martialism and wildness, which in turn gave particular prestige to the ICS men administrating there. Those probationers accepted into the Punjabi branch of the ICS were considered an elite, the best candidates of their generation.Footnote 22 The service as a whole offered substantial responsibility at a young age, with huge districts under an individual civil servant's command, and Punjab in particular was famed for the independence of its men,Footnote 23 a reputation implicit in the self-representation offered in these men's memoirs. Even as the service faced the imminent reality of independence and concomitant necessity of modernization in the 1920s and 1930s, Punjab's mythic status at least was of a province and an administration untamed, where civilians roamed huge distances on horseback and dispensed justice under the shade of village trees. The imagery is not unimportant, even for aspiring civilians joining the Punjabi service in the 1930s and 1940s. Recognizing the principle of the transfer of power did not lead to a pragmatic recognition of its imminence, and traditionalism remained dominant in shaping probationers’ expectations of the service they joined. Naturally, this could perhaps be seen as a fragile defensiveness of the status quo, but ties as much into the sense of inertia created by a strong structural esprit de corps in the style of administration.
As one of the two provinces divided between India and Pakistan at independence, the religious constitution of Punjab was naturally a vital element of its external reputation and the internal experience of British civil servants.Footnote 24 Most significant in the development of the British officers’ partition narratives, however, is the fact that the religious heterogeneity was spanned by a capacity for political unity right up to the early 1940s. The mixture of religious communities in Punjab created a stronger sense of fitting into a regional identity than a religiously structured one, and this powerful Punjabi identity impressed upon British administrators as well, to the extent that they felt in their post-1947 lives that a ‘Punjabi’ identity was still important to them. The unique social composition of Punjab was expressed politically in its successful Unionist party, and the stability of this coalition is attributed throughout the memoirs to the leadership of Sir Sikander Hyat Khan. However, the pragmatic position of the Unionist party due to its British support was also significant to its enduring power into the 1940s.Footnote 25 The event of Sir Sikander's death in 1942 is highlighted in the memoirs of almost all Punjabi Anglo-Indians as the turning point in communal relations, with the regime under his influence being a genuinely unified and settled one, and the rising status of Jinnah's Muslim League as the destabilizing factor. These circumstances, then—or certainly the impression of them accepted and represented by British civil servants—create the sense of suddenness with which Punjabi stability was seen to decline into the violent tragedy of partition, and the concomitant difficulty all those involved had in coming to terms with the events. The idea of Punjab as a stable and well-integrated society prior to the events of the mid-1940s is conveyed similarly in partition memories collected by Ishtiaq Ahmed and Urvashi Butalia.Footnote 26 Although questioning their complacency in retrospect as they consider the relationships between different religious groups, several of these interviewees talk about inter-religious friendships, and successful communities right up to the last months before partition.Footnote 27
In the old days it had been normal in times of trouble to take stern action against village officials, arms licensees and the like who did not cooperate. This was effective because nobody wanted to lose his privileges. Once the date had been fixed for the departure of the British, privileges held under British rule ceased to mean anything. Nobody in his senses was going to give useful information to help maintain law and order if by doing so he might incur the displeasure of the future rulers of the country. Even so most of these privilege-holders hated what was happening and were ready to help if they could do so on the quiet. It had become useless to be stern; the only possible technique was to be constantly on the move so as to see them as often as possible.Footnote 28
These are the words of a district officer, Patrick Brendon, working in Gurgaon in 1947, demonstrating the very real loss of power these men felt, having been accustomed to a remit prior to 1946 that allowed them to influence huge swathes of the Indian population with the practised distribution and control of ‘privileges’. In the well-recognized ‘transfer of power’ it is equally important to observe the loss of power experienced by the colonial generation and the dissipation of control within the local administration. Brendon recognizes the experienced simplicity of the system as it broke down in a comment about the increasing tension of the 1940s, writing how much he came to ‘admire the men of the Victorian age who had built the machine so well that it continued to function, however haltingly, despite the strains of the 1940s’.Footnote 29 In this interpretation, the period highlighted the ease with which young British probationers had been able to join the administration of a country so foreign to them, adopting a power they took for granted, within only a few months. Brendon's comment recognizes an administrative ‘machine’, a system one slipped into as a new arrival, and yet the ability to control that he notices the loss of is based not so much in a ‘machine’, but in the sense of recognition and acceptance as a purveyor of power. Indeed, in entering the ICS, one's ready acceptance as a ruler relied upon the adoption of a learnt prestige:Footnote 30 the imagery of power practised by the British in India. In fitting himself into a ‘system of control’ linked back to the late Victorian Raj, Brendon narrativizes an image of partition here as the end-point for an overarching colonial project, his mentality being that of the beneficiary of generations of British rulers, faced with more challenging times. The narrative constructed is one of the ICS esprit de corps on a grand scale, with successive generations pursuing the same beneficent colonial project with an inertia that belies the reality of early twentieth-century northern India.
The acceptance of norms of performative behaviour comes across in many accounts of the early years of service. John Martin Fearn, a Punjabi probationer in 1940, commented that it said much of the service that ‘the young ICS entry was cheerfully acknowledged as the senior officer of the not too distant future’.Footnote 31 This quick assumption of responsibility and status was not only a reflection on the personalities of Fearn's colleagues. Rather, the nature of the service—its size in relation to the vast population it served, the impossibility of the bureaucratic endeavour to ‘know’ everything occurring in a district—necessitated an approach which relied on imagery of power at all times, and action wherever possible. The British population of India was minute throughout the period of colonial rule, dictating the style of control possible. For the new white man in the Punjab, adopting the actions of a prestigious service—the ‘heaven born’Footnote 32 —was the essence of rule, not only for himself but for the entire community. Without prestige, it had nothing, as the white population was militarily insignificant. The key to the local pre-1947 state lay in its performance of power,Footnote 33 the injection of as little action as possible, used in the most visible way. As Orwell's 1936 essay, ‘Shooting an Elephant’, characterizes,
it is the condition of his rule that he shall spend his life in trying to impress the ‘natives’, and so in every crisis he has got to do what the ‘natives’ expect of him. He wears a mask and his face grows to fit it. . . . A sahib has got to act like a sahib; he has got to appear resolute, to know his own mind and do definite things. . .my whole life, every white man's life in the East, was one long struggle not to be laughed at.Footnote 34
The pressure on this acting out of the power relationship in accordance with the expectations of the local audience naturally increased from the 1920s, as the memoirs of district officers reflect. Sir Conrad Corfield arrived in the Punjab in 1920, in the aftermath of the Jallianwallah Bagh massacre, and was witness very quickly to both protests and the ICS's approach to them. Within a few months of his arrival, he watched his District Commissioner cope with a crowd chanting ‘Gandhiji Ki Jai’ (long live Gandhi) with the use of his presence alone.Footnote 35 Corfield recalls,
as soon as the tail of the procession had passed, the D.C. descended into the street and walked slowly towards the massed throng. He gazed thoughtfully from face to face of its leaders, as though to mark well the features of each and bear them in mind. No word was spoken as he stood alone in the middle of the street under the hissing paraffin lamps, contemplating those who defied the Raj. One by one the crowd began to melt, until only a sprinkling of onlookers remained. They all salaamed as we stepped into the waiting car.Footnote 36
Corfield was working in the princely states as political agent by 1946 so does not contrast this experience with those of a district officer at the point of transfer, and yet, writing in the 1960s, his memory of the performance in action prompts a teleological reflection. He asks, ‘personality and prestige had won the day, but how long could it succeed against those who seemed more interested in securing power than maintaining peace?’Footnote 37 The significance of this act lay in its potential emptiness and the realization underlying this comment that prestige could not be backed by an equal display of military force, both for moral and pragmatic reasons. The performance could only last as long as it reflected central political power: once realization of Indian independence was imminent, prestige lost its potency. Thus to return to Brendon's account of 1947,
on 20th February H.M.G. announced that British rule in India would come to an end by 30th June 1948 at the latest. This was followed by Khizr Hyat's decision not to remain in office in the face of Muslim League opposition. Congress ceased to be a government party and was therefore no longer interested in maintaining the peace of the District. Everyone began to look ahead to the day when the British would go.Footnote 38
In the transfer of power in Delhi in 1947, lay a fundamental loss for district officers. Not only was a date set for the actual loss of control, in reality the foundation of local power in its performance was automatically undermined. Having said this, the prestige of a white face, and the potent cultural trappings associated with it, did not lose status altogether. Thus the position of the British ICS officer in 1946–1947 was an ambivalent one. R. H. Belcher, who stayed in Multan until September 1947, recalls seeing horrific evidence of violence and yet feeling no fear for himself. He writes of an incident where he had to scare off a raiding party from a passing train,
that was the only time I ever used, or carried, a gun during my whole time in India. Throughout those weeks of terrible disorder and bloodshed I had no need to feel any anxiety for my own safety; a white skin was a passport to free, and indeed welcome passage through the most menacing communal groups.Footnote 39
Although the significance of British prestige had evaporated overnight, its embedded cultural meaning was retained, leaving British men in the Punjab with a position of being separated from the violence because of the remainder of their racially-marked status, without the power to act to stop it. There is a sense in these narrativizations of the need to justify a feeling of helplessness of local responsibility without the central backing to enact power in the only way the ICS had ever really known, and yet, it was not really powerlessness that these civil servants experienced in 1947. Rather, the evidence of the continued impact of whiteness suggests a shift of control, no longer held as extensively in the hands of British civil servants, but not so completely removed as to make these men feel absolved of the guilt of having witnessed massacres in which their ability to intervene was compromised. The narrative that produces an image of the transition from total power to total powerlessness is a deceptive one, a creation of men who knew themselves to represent something more than their individual status. Like Brendon's recourse to the Victorian image in which he cast himself, these men's efforts to draw a sharp contrast between pre-1947 and the year itself offers self-validation through support of the system of rule. By narrating an experience of the system ‘at work’ right up to the decision to depart and divide in 1947, followed by a sudden and complete loss of control, the men are able to negate their personal feelings of guilt concomitantly with a resounding tribute to the values and effectiveness of a colonial ideology they represent as uniformly effective prior to the final collapse.
Witnessing violence
The narrative that defines the events of 1946–1947 as unprecedented and shocking is the most striking element of the British ICS memoirs. Consistently, the wartime atmosphere of the Punjab is described as peaceful and cooperative, with incidents of communal tension only occasionally warranting a mention. For instance, despite the immediacy of independence, Brendon describes Gurgaon in late 1946 and early 1947,
as peaceful as I had ever known it in India. Everyone was prosperous after a series of good harvests; crime was under control; there were no agitations or movements; the district staff was free of any serious scandals.Footnote 40
His experience after the announcement of British withdrawal was, as described above, one of powerlessness and violence, and yet the general perception in the British community still struggled to adapt to this sudden change in the status quo. Brendon recalls a visit to Delhi:
[A]s I left Toam I could see ugly columns of smoke rising from Hindu villages which the Meos were burning in a counter-offensive. I went on to see my wife and child at the Willingdon nursing home. I was very dirty and everyone there looked more than a little perplexed. New Delhi had not by then adjusted itself to communal fighting.Footnote 41
This narrative of the breakdown into communal violence thus represents Punjab as a region previously untouched by the degree of political activity and rioting seen elsewhere. It creates an image, common to all the memoirs of district officers, of a situation in 1947 which was wholly unprecedented, a colonial status quo only really shaken following the announcement of the British departure in February 1947.
This representation of Punjab as communally stable, and of the partition violence as wholly without foundation in the wartime years, is similar to that of Indian and Pakistani interview subjects. The narrative produced in both cases suggests the unpredictability of violence in 1946–1947 by not portraying any development of tensions during the 1940s. What is emphasized, though, is how cooperative inter-religious relations were previously, and how shocking the violence was as a result. Punjab was certainly unusual in its level of stability during wartime, as evidenced by the cooperation of the province's Unionist government and the high proportion of Punjabis committed to the war effort. However, the narrative of a peaceful Punjab interrupted by unpredictable—and thus uncontrollable—violence, has an important corollary effect. As suggested in the previous section, the loss of the power behind the prestige of ‘whiteness’ left District Commissioners limited in their ability to prevent violence and loss of life in the areas which had so recently been under their control. Along with the tremendous power of the District Commissioner-role in the Punjab had come a heavy weight of responsibility, a responsibility that these men felt at this stage they were no longer able to dispense. In affirming the value of the role to which they had given so many years of professional and personal life, the imagery and values of the colonial state became even more important in retrospect. Describing in their memoirs a colonial institution that weathered the storms and operated with a real level of control over its subjects concomitantly validated the careers which had dominated these men's lives, and indeed formed the basis of their adult identity. The investment in positively representing the colonial past offered an immediate effect in supporting the self-worth of individuals, but also left a broader inheritance of collective memorializing of the colonial way of life.
This feeling of personal grief, mingled with anger at the loss of status, and the fact that there was no longer a need for the career in which they had spent their lives to date, is transmitted in many of the accounts in condemnation of political change and the move to democracy:
the Labour Government no doubt regarded the quitting of India as a great act of statesmanship. Others may have shared this view; it all depends on one's standpoint and perspective. To one Punjab officer at least it appeared as an act of betrayal and even cowardice; one does not leave in the lurch and to bloody slaughter people who had trusted in one's will and ability to protect them. Much fine talk is made of the recognition of rights, of self determination and of the evils of autocratic and alien rule, but when responsibilities for life and welfare have been assumed and exercised over a long period of years it is futile and irrelevant to harp on the rights and wrongs of that assumption, and the responsibilities become a trust not to be discarded unless there is a successor at least as well able to maintain it.Footnote 42
Belcher's memories also reflect this sense of betraying people who had placed trust in his ability to retain the status quo. He wrote in his memoir about a meeting with a group of tribal leaders during a tour made in April or May, 1947.Footnote 43 This group had received recognition from the colonial government and thus expressed to him their concerns about what status they could expect to hold in the postcolonial regime. He wrote,
the tears they shed in front of me were genuine; and I felt the lameness of my answers in justifying the decisions that had been taken, although I believed them to be right and inevitable. These people and their anxieties were now, however, of less immediate importance for the maintenance of peace and order than the Civil Services and the Army, whose effectiveness and whose loyalties began now to be in doubt either from their anxieties about their future or, as the news multiplied of communal outbreaks, from passionate feelings of communal bitterness.Footnote 44
These descriptions, focused on a sense that they were betraying people who would prefer them to have stayed, again validates the system and the job that these men had done. The undesirability of change for the departing civil servants is blown up in these accounts into a representation that what followed the Raj period could not be desirable for the communities they had previously administered.
A notable exception to the narrative of peace descending suddenly and unexpectedly into communal violence is found in the memoirs of Sir James Penny, who retired in 1945 from a senior position in the Secretariat. Not involved in the upheaval of independence and partition, he recalls his memories of wartime demonstrations in intricate detail as the most violent experiences for which he felt some sense of responsibility and involvement. Returning from leave in November 1939, he observed the marching and drilling of organizations like the Khaksars and Hindu Mahants, and worked closely with Sir Sikander Hyat Khan in putting down the violence.Footnote 45 He wrote in his memoir,
each community saw in these armies a way of showing its strength and working up the enthusiasm of its followers. Early in 1940 it became clear that there was nothing for it but to grasp the nettle. Processions had been prohibited in Lahore, but the Khaksars announced their intention of marching through the city. Sikander was in a difficult position. He was naturally reluctant to antagonise his co-religionists, and after all as a politician he depended on Muslim votes. He asked me if I thought we ought to put our foot down and stop the march. I said we ought. If we let it pass we would only have to take on the Sikhs next.Footnote 46
This decision required his support for an armed response, which resulted in the death of four policemen and 31 Khaksars, following which the Defence of India rules were used to ban the Khaksar organization.Footnote 47 The severity of this experience, in the absence of personal contact with partition violence, leads Penny to justify his own decisions, and revisit a shocking and memorable chapter of his career. For others who stayed on, the absence of similar accounts perhaps reflects the extent to which, like Butalia's subjects, they found the brutality of 1947 experiences ‘indescribable’.Footnote 48 In comparison, the exercise of police control over demonstrations during wartime is thus insignificant enough to warrant no mention in memoir narrativizations of the 1940s.
Interrogating the transfer of power
The reality of the transfer of power at district level appears from British civil servants’ memoirs as essentially a power vacuum. For the district commissioners ‘handing over’, the experience is described in several cases as one of having no one to hand over to. In the partitioned Punjab, Sikh and Hindu ICS men left West Punjab, and Muslim administrators left their posts in East Punjab in the nervous months before 14 August, in order to be on the ‘right side’ of the partition line once it was announced after the date of independence. This meant British officers continued to hold the reins during the summer months until Sikh and Hindu men could arrive in East Punjabi districts, and Muslims in the West. The extent of the violence delayed this arrival and extended the period of British ambivalent custodianship. Thus as Belcher describes, working in Multan in 1947, ‘on August 15th, no permanent incumbent having yet been appointed to the Commissionership, I myself raised the Pakistan flag with appropriate ceremony on the Commissioner's office and residence’.Footnote 49 Recalling the chaos he was witness to following the independence date, Belcher adds,
in the West Punjab this terrifying storm of bloodshed and disorder burst on a critically weakened administration. Almost all the British I.C.S. officers had left at Independence, as had. . .all the non-Muslim senior Indian officers, so that a number of districts were in the hands of relatively inexperienced men, some only recently appointed to them.Footnote 50
Uncomfortably cognisant of his own limited influence, Belcher was thus nonetheless aware of the absence and inexperience of incoming administrators. His account demonstrates the extent to which the independence and partition of Punjab produced a loss of power by the retreating government and its officers, but also the attitude this produced. For the British men leaving in 1947, the situation they had observed at the point of departure appeared to offer little hope of success for the two new independent states. At the local level, the weaknesses of an inexperienced and scattered replacement staff left an impression among the British officials that their handover could lead only to collapse and loss of the embedded administrative norms of the pre-1947 era.Footnote 51
A. A. Williams’ memories of his last months in Amritsar give a similar impression of the hollowness of administrative efforts against a backdrop of bloodshed. Following an intense period of arson and looting in June 1947, a 48-hour curfew was imposed and Williams toured the charred remains of the city's buildings. He writes, ‘an Emergency Act was prepared and promulgated, but it could be little more than a paper exercise to try and deal with the immense human and financial problem in the dying days of the province’.Footnote 52 Police work also continued, and Williams recalls the sense of insufficiency he felt in trying to bring murder cases to trial:
the petitioners—for whom there was almost invariably nothing to be said—could perhaps feel unjustly treated; the thousands of mass murderers of the troubles could never properly be brought to book; and even when one could be caught red-handed it was not unknown for him to be released on bail at once by a coreligionist on the judiciary bench.Footnote 53
This case demonstrates how power at the local level had slipped out of the hands of ICS men. The construction in their narratives of partition of an image of a power vacuum following total control of their district belies the fact that with such limited manpower, it was never possible for a district officer to really take everything into his own hands. Rather, the displacement of power from ICS hands during 1947 was an extension of previous limitations on their ability to control their districts. In the judicial context, the provision of false witnesses and reliance on local clerks were just two elements of the process in which control of the outcome of cases had always been displaced from the supposed head of proceedings. In Williams’ comment, he remembers frustration at verdicts going against his control, but the representation of this as a phenomenon contained within the final years of British rule is misleading. What for these men was a loss of power was in reality a displacement which added further to existing structures of local control, and the representation offers an insight into the narrative the men involved wished to construct about their ability to rule pre-1947. Recording this as a dichotomy of power and powerlessness operates as a justification of a system which had worked well prior to the 1940s and collapsing only at this point, but British colonial power was never total, just as 1947 was not in reality a power vacuum.
The power transfer in district administration in 1947 impacts upon memoirs of the British civil servants present in several ways. Naturally, the limited number of men involved in maintaining government activities in this period creates a pragmatic issue in ‘knowing’ partition. At the height of state change, the state had so little manpower effectively deployed that only a few memories survive. The experience of being the final remnant of the British cadre left in the Punjab also shapes the nature of the memories related. There is a strong theme running through these remaining memoirs of abandonment by central government, both in Delhi and at the centre of Empire, in London. For these men, a strong narrative of central abdication of what they saw as responsibilities to which they had given their lives provides an interpretation which separates them from responsibility for the massacres of partition, and equally distracts from any idea of a weakening colonial state previous to 1947. Belcher's memoir exemplifies this description of apparent divorce between centre and district and the necessity of managing without communication links:
The slide into general disorder was rapid as the rumours or harder news grew of the murderous attacks on Muslims in East Punjab; our constant efforts to prevent retaliatory attacks on our non-Muslims were only partly and patchily successful. It soon became apparent that one's authority in such matters, even with direct subordinates, could only be relied upon to run as far as one's eye could see. Communications and personal mobility were therefore a more than usually vital necessity, but both soon became a serious problem. The posts, telegraphs and telephones were an early casualty either through the cutting of wires or the disappearance of staff.Footnote 54
The sense of abandonment expressed by the British ICS men who stayed in Punjab during the summer of 1947 was thus a dual effect: partly, with staff lost from every level of administration, the infrastructure of rule was on hold, leaving civil servants dealing with the most serious events of their careers in the subcontinent with limitations on their capacity for control; but equally, this representation was valuable in negating individual and collective failure in empire.
This period leaves a legacy of guilt and frustration throughout ICS memoirs: against the incursion of democracy, the inadequacy of the arrangements for transfer of power, the weakness of their own position in the last years of British rule, and the divorce of central government decision-making from district tensions. Slater recalls his family's departure with the words ‘it should have been a moving occasion, but I was almost beyond caring’.Footnote 55 Sir Conrad Corfield similarly detached himself from government plans for the subcontinent in which he felt he could have no part. Leaving Punjab in July 1947, he recorded, ‘I boarded the plane at Karachi with a feeling of nausea, as though my own honour had been smirched and I had deserted my friends’.Footnote 56 The embodiment of colonial values, coupled with his lifelong service in the Punjab, made the breakdown of the state in these final months too traumatising to witness. The best he could hope for was that British efforts in India had not ‘been quite wasted’.Footnote 57 For Corfield, leaving India to ‘democracy’ meant abandoning the country to a complete absence of control in the districts and a failure of centre-periphery communications amidst communal rioting. The contrast for these men was between what they had experienced and now narrativized as a secure paternalistic government, and the situation in which they left Punjab in mid-1947 amidst violence and chaos, where no voice of state control was active. The previous model not only appeared the most suitable in retrospect, but was a style of rule in which these men had invested a belief: for them, the paternalistic system was the one which worked for India, and the concept of the new nation adopting the Westminster model of governance simply did not fit in with their ideas about India and Indians. In consequence, their predictions for postcolonial India and Pakistan were uniformly pessimistic. Belcher comments on the ‘great relief I felt at the time when my service came to an end’, recalling ‘I felt acutely the sense of futility and despair over the division of the Punjab at partition and its tragic consequences—and the ineffectual part it fell to me to play in those grim days’.Footnote 58 Democracy and independence meant both a loss of personal status and value, and a collapse of the system in which those involved in empire had to some extent an emotional and practical investment.
These reflections are layered with a sense of personal responsibility. The frustration of not being able to act for the general good at this stage in their careers gave ICS men an overarching feeling of the futility of their efforts, not only in 1947 when their hands were tied by the breakdown of the administration but more generally in terms of their legacy of achievements in the Punjab. The fruits of democracy were referred to with cynicism as bitter in comparison with the benefits of a benevolent and stable paternalistic state, such as that maintained by the British administration. There is no recognition in these accounts of the fact that the ‘steel frame’ of that administration survived the British civil servants’ departure, with the Indian Administrative Service and the remaining Indian and Pakistani officers continuing many of the pre-1947 practices in the newly independent states. The criticisms these men aimed at central government in the wake of their departure from the subcontinent partly reflect an effort to come to terms with their own role in the transfer of power. The image constructed of these months for those who worked up to the partition date was of a crippling power vacuum within which little administrative action was possible, and the retention of ICS practices and values appeared unlikely. The personal impact of extricating oneself from a situation where state control was to a large extent suspended is apparent in the juxtaposition in these memoirs of fond memorializations of a pre-1946 Punjabi idyll and a post-partition imagery of foreignness and futility in a region once felt almost to be ‘home’.
Conclusion
This paper has considered three aspects of the British ICS experience of partition in Punjab to shed light on the mentality of these men in the process of state change. Approaching the topic through ICS memoirs has some limitations in terms of representation and memorialization, but by considering the nature of and reasons for the memoirs’ constructed narratives, they can be used to demonstrate the attitudes of these men and their legacy within the Punjab. The nature of these memoirs in themselves suggests something broader about the study of traumatic historical events like forced migration, state change and popular violence. In such cases, the expectation of being able to produce a clear factual narrative of the episode is perhaps a mistaken one. Where the source material for an event relies upon the first-hand accounts of individuals subjected to the trauma of physical and emotional disruption, witnessing and being involved in violence, it is not a solid factual narrative that emerges but a sense of the times as has been collectively remembered. For British civil servants working in Punjab up to 1947, bearing witness to such episodes of violence, with the concomitant realization of the futility of their own attempts to control the situation, prompted a similar response. In memoirs of the period, there are consistent narrativizations of a dramatic change in 1947 from power to powerlessness, an imagery used to support the system in which they had worked.
In this paper, I have considered three elements of this remembering. The first aspect of British ICS experience in 1946–1947 was the loss of the basis of colonial rule in India, the undermining of status as acted out through the prestige of ‘whiteness’. This performance of power was at the heart of British rule in India and shaped the nature of the administration, in particular, the ability of such a small cadre of often very young British men to control the huge population of the subcontinent. Reflections in these memoirs on the nature of the service they entered in the 1920s and 1930s recognize the features which were thrown into sharp relief by their collapse, once British departure had been announced in 1947. These aspects included the quick acceptance of young probationers into a position of significant power, the importance of carefully applied action in a visible context to achieve an imagery of control, and the ideas of a unified service in which one ‘towed the line’ to good effect in demonstrating one's membership of the elite. Within their memories of the ICS culture lies also a reflection on the period directly before British departure from the subcontinent. The prestige on which these ICS tenets leant, evaporated as the political force behind it was removed. In recognizing the smooth running of pre-1946 Punjab, the ICS men's memoirs recall and contextualize the rapid decline of their own position, but also accentuate a representation of colonial Punjab as stable and controlled as against a rejection of paternalistic government in favour of chaos at independence.
The second aspect of the transfer period which becomes apparent in these memoirs is the narrativization of communal calm prior to the violence of 1946–1947. Supported by a stable Unionist government and cooperative war effort in the Punjab, the narrative of peace before the decision to partition Punjab also indicates a desire to mark out the unpredictability and corollary uncontrollability of the partition violence, simply to avert the sense of personal responsibility for deaths witnessed during 1947. In conjunction with the loss of status the previous section recognized, the experience of violence without the level of control sufficient to prevent it, was a traumatising one. A sense of responsibility for the lives of those living in the district continued, with a recognition of their lack of capacity to provide any effective protection. The consistency of the narrative that depicts the colonial system smoothly at work prior to 1946, and subsequently uncontrollably altered, involves an element other than a realistic description: it represents a collective remembering of events which these men found difficult to come to terms with, and creates an imagery of the Raj as an unshakably effective institution prior to the events of the mid-1940s.
The final section indicates the extent to which ICS memoirs portray the transfer of power as in essence simply a power vacuum: that a key element of the partition experience of these men was of a poverty of manpower, crippling their ability to effect any control over the situation, or to hand over power to the new local state. This sense of breakdown of the local state compounds the effects of the previous two sections to indicate a situation in which British ICS men were personally disempowered but were still looked to for a response. These memoirs thus portray a position of responsibility without power. Partly this is aimed at the government without whose support the local state lost its status, and also it finds fault with the forces of history which brought self-rule and democracy: in the final year of their experience, these men saw not a potentially successful state but a power vacuum in which they were left to observe atrocities which they had no power to prevent. The transfer of power in the local state is thus shaped into a memorialization which celebrates late colonial India in order to condemn and extract the ICS from the violent birth of postcolonial Punjab at partition. In their partition narratives, British civil servants portray a collapse of the local state and loss of power which negated the efforts of their personal and professional investment in the Punjab. Combining an effort to overcome the trauma of their experiences and cope with the guilt of having been relatively powerless bystanders to tragic violence, these narratives, like those of the people actually involved in bloodshed, emphasize the unpredictability of the events of 1947 in order to overcome their memory. In narrativizing a sudden descent into uncontrollable violence at partition, these ICS memoirs validate the careers of individuals and in so doing, construct a collective memorial to the colonial system.
The pessimism underlining ICS attitudes to democracy in the subcontinent is in some sense not surprising, in that their own careers and self-worth were built upon a paternalistic style of government. However, at the stage when these men chose a career in the subcontinent, the 1920s and 1930s, not only was the pressure for independent government high in India, it was a declared aim of the British administration. In this sense, animosity towards the realization of independent democracy seems rather more unexpected: after all, this was the recognized target of the British administration's role in this period. This does then beg the question of what legacy these men left in the Punjab. Many of the memoirs paint a vision of collapse for the Punjab, a sharp disjuncture between an effective administration, and a chaotic democracy. Continuity is not something they seem to have considered possible. The transformation to a democratic modern nation state, had an underlying element of connection with ICS values and the mentality that went with it. A strong element of this mentality was pessimism about the viability of democracy as a workable system of government in a country like India. The practical retention of the colonial administrations’ ‘steel frame’ and the men involved in running them, necessarily holds some basis in a surviving mentality of pessimism about India and Indians—a seed of doubt about the project of the future in evidence as an institution and a cadre with an investment in what had gone before.
