| India / Pakistan Partition 1947 23:09 - Aug 15 with 9818 views | GloryHunter |
I keep hearing people on TV and radio, who were there before partition, saying that the Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims all used to live happily together with no problems. So how come they started murdering each other? Any Rs with family history who can explain why it all kicked off? |  | | |  |
| India / Pakistan Partition 1947 on 23:53 - Aug 15 with 5224 views | kensalriser |
Good question.
Perceived injustice exploited by people able to whip up identity politics added to the whatever percentage of people (young men, typically) disposed towards violence. Similar things in the former Yugoslavia and current shitstorm in Syria/Iraq. |  |
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| India / Pakistan Partition 1947 on 00:20 - Aug 16 with 5198 views | BromleyHoop |
I don't know a great deal at all about partition but it's never stopped me pontificating on a subject before.
There seems to be general criticism of the Brits when we departed. I know that hundreds of thousands are believed to have died around the time of partition in tit for tat attacks but surely dividing the country was done for a valid reason and maybe, in the long run, has prevented many more deaths in the years since partition?
ps I have to say I'm enjoying all the programmes about partition, very interesting. [Post edited 16 Aug 2017 0:20]
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| India / Pakistan Partition 1947 on 06:30 - Aug 16 with 5130 views | AgedR |
Salmon Rushdie's Midnights Children paints a vivid picture of the partition times.
Obviously he excercises a large portion of artistic license, but, I think it's a masterful book and it gave me a real feel for the subject.
I really recommend anyone to give it a go. |  |
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| India / Pakistan Partition 1947 on 06:50 - Aug 16 with 5119 views | Boston |
| India / Pakistan Partition 1947 on 06:30 - Aug 16 by AgedR |
Salmon Rushdie's Midnights Children paints a vivid picture of the partition times.
Obviously he excercises a large portion of artistic license, but, I think it's a masterful book and it gave me a real feel for the subject.
I really recommend anyone to give it a go. |
Have you read the one where Scotland partitions itself off from England? |  |
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| India / Pakistan Partition 1947 on 09:48 - Aug 16 with 4975 views | CiderwithRsie |
My grandparents were in India (Indian Army) from 1919 to partition. My grandfather died before I can remember but I recall my granny being quite clear that it was no real surprise that a massacre broke out immediately - there were people she cared about that she was never able to trace. Many Brits argued that we should stay on precisely because there would be bloodshed if and when we left. Race and religious riots weren't that unusual.
Of course that's self-serving, the British Empire wasn't in India for the benefit of the Indians and there is a hell of a lot of truth in the book Kropotkin cites upthread. At least some of the conflict was tacitly encouraged by the Brits - divide and rule. Some of it wasn't so much deliberately encouraged as sort of institutionalised - e.g. Indian Army regiments were recruited on race/religious bases e.g. Sikhs in one unit, Punjabi Muslims in another.
But its equally disingenuous to pretend that there wasn't religious hostility beforehand. For several hundred years before the Brits got there the country was largely run by Muslim dynasties even though they were a minority, which tells you plenty. There was a time when the Moguls ruled in a reasonably tolerant way (especially Akbar) but that went tits up when one of them (Aurangzeb) went full-on fundamentalist. (There's an old book by Bamber Gascoigne which is a decent and readable introduction to Mogul history if you can get hold of a copy, decent libraries might have one or you might get it through amazon second hand.) | | | |
| India / Pakistan Partition 1947 on 09:55 - Aug 16 with 4954 views | loftboy |
My girlfriends Dad was in his late teens and had to flee his home, apparently his family was very wealthy but when he went back years later his home had been run down into a ghetto, he didn't telll my girlfriend much but he basically fled to Germany where he married my girlfriends mum and saw stuff that no one should ever witness, including travelling on a train with corpses. |  |
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| India / Pakistan Partition 1947 on 13:03 - Aug 16 with 4824 views | BromleyHoop |
| India / Pakistan Partition 1947 on 09:48 - Aug 16 by CiderwithRsie |
My grandparents were in India (Indian Army) from 1919 to partition. My grandfather died before I can remember but I recall my granny being quite clear that it was no real surprise that a massacre broke out immediately - there were people she cared about that she was never able to trace. Many Brits argued that we should stay on precisely because there would be bloodshed if and when we left. Race and religious riots weren't that unusual.
Of course that's self-serving, the British Empire wasn't in India for the benefit of the Indians and there is a hell of a lot of truth in the book Kropotkin cites upthread. At least some of the conflict was tacitly encouraged by the Brits - divide and rule. Some of it wasn't so much deliberately encouraged as sort of institutionalised - e.g. Indian Army regiments were recruited on race/religious bases e.g. Sikhs in one unit, Punjabi Muslims in another.
But its equally disingenuous to pretend that there wasn't religious hostility beforehand. For several hundred years before the Brits got there the country was largely run by Muslim dynasties even though they were a minority, which tells you plenty. There was a time when the Moguls ruled in a reasonably tolerant way (especially Akbar) but that went tits up when one of them (Aurangzeb) went full-on fundamentalist. (There's an old book by Bamber Gascoigne which is a decent and readable introduction to Mogul history if you can get hold of a copy, decent libraries might have one or you might get it through amazon second hand.) |
Could it not be argued then that the Raj largely kept the lid on all the sectarian violence regardless of the how's and why's and even before we'd left it erupted again. Surely partitioning the country was therefor a sensible option to try to keep the communities apart and from killing each other? Literally drawing a line in the sand. | |
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| India / Pakistan Partition 1947 on 18:24 - Aug 16 with 4645 views | kropotkin41 |
| India / Pakistan Partition 1947 on 13:03 - Aug 16 by BromleyHoop |
Could it not be argued then that the Raj largely kept the lid on all the sectarian violence regardless of the how's and why's and even before we'd left it erupted again. Surely partitioning the country was therefor a sensible option to try to keep the communities apart and from killing each other? Literally drawing a line in the sand. |
That could be argued, but I don't think it's a very strong argument, given how long India had been multi-ethnic before the establishment of the Raj. |  |
| ‘morbid curiosity about where this is all going’ |
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| India / Pakistan Partition 1947 on 18:45 - Aug 16 with 4614 views | johncharles |
We put Mountbatten in charge. A well connected man of wealth and privilege and the brains of a lugworm.
He made a complete arse of it. |  |
| Strong and stable my arse. |
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| India / Pakistan Partition 1947 on 18:52 - Aug 16 with 4607 views | BromleyHoop |
| India / Pakistan Partition 1947 on 18:24 - Aug 16 by kropotkin41 |
That could be argued, but I don't think it's a very strong argument, given how long India had been multi-ethnic before the establishment of the Raj. |
Just because they were multi ethnic doesn't mean to say that they lived in some brotherly paradise where there were no problems prior to the Raj. From what I've read the Muslim Moghuls ruled their majority Hindu population for hundreds of years prior to the arrival of the Brits with a rod of iron...and that's putting it kindly. 'Hindu Kush' translates as 'Hindu slaughter' due to the number of Hindu slaves who died on the forced march to Muslim countries. I'm sure the Empire was far from perfect but I for one will not be bowing my head in shame at what Brits did in the sub continent. | |
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| India / Pakistan Partition 1947 on 18:53 - Aug 16 with 4603 views | BromleyHoop |
| India / Pakistan Partition 1947 on 18:45 - Aug 16 by johncharles |
We put Mountbatten in charge. A well connected man of wealth and privilege and the brains of a lugworm.
He made a complete arse of it. |
He's was a member of the Royal family, what do you expect. | |
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| India / Pakistan Partition 1947 on 19:47 - Aug 16 with 4558 views | kropotkin41 |
| India / Pakistan Partition 1947 on 18:52 - Aug 16 by BromleyHoop |
Just because they were multi ethnic doesn't mean to say that they lived in some brotherly paradise where there were no problems prior to the Raj. From what I've read the Muslim Moghuls ruled their majority Hindu population for hundreds of years prior to the arrival of the Brits with a rod of iron...and that's putting it kindly. 'Hindu Kush' translates as 'Hindu slaughter' due to the number of Hindu slaves who died on the forced march to Muslim countries. I'm sure the Empire was far from perfect but I for one will not be bowing my head in shame at what Brits did in the sub continent. |
I didn't suggest that pre-Raj India was a paradise. The fact remains that the British Raj employed a long term strategy of divide and rule which was used across the British Empire, and indeed in other empires. India's inter-ethnic violence was gravely worsened by British rule, and by British tactics during the run up to Indian independence. The British Raj was a catastrophe for India from beginning to end. | |
| ‘morbid curiosity about where this is all going’ |
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| India / Pakistan Partition 1947 on 20:58 - Aug 16 with 4518 views | BromleyHoop |
| India / Pakistan Partition 1947 on 19:47 - Aug 16 by kropotkin41 |
I didn't suggest that pre-Raj India was a paradise. The fact remains that the British Raj employed a long term strategy of divide and rule which was used across the British Empire, and indeed in other empires. India's inter-ethnic violence was gravely worsened by British rule, and by British tactics during the run up to Indian independence. The British Raj was a catastrophe for India from beginning to end. |
'The British Raj was a catastrophe for India from beginning to end'.
It would seem that many Indians disagree with you. | |
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| India / Pakistan Partition 1947 on 21:38 - Aug 16 with 4477 views | kropotkin41 |
| India / Pakistan Partition 1947 on 20:58 - Aug 16 by BromleyHoop |
'The British Raj was a catastrophe for India from beginning to end'.
It would seem that many Indians disagree with you. |
There are many British people who still believe that the British Empire was a marvellous thing, and they'd be as wrong as any Indians who think the Raj was good for India....... I've not read or heard the opinions of any of them, btw.
You are entirely welcome to your opinion, Bromley, that's fine, but we could go on and on about this for a long time if you like. Before I turned my hand to organic gardening and matters sustainable I was an academic, Modern History PhD, and my specialism was British imperialism. My rantings on this subject are not just the random meanderings of a mad lefty, but the result of quite a lot of work on the subject, not to mention thousands and thousands of lines of spilled ink. | |
| ‘morbid curiosity about where this is all going’ |
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| India / Pakistan Partition 1947 on 22:10 - Aug 16 with 4452 views | CiderwithRsie |
| India / Pakistan Partition 1947 on 21:38 - Aug 16 by kropotkin41 |
There are many British people who still believe that the British Empire was a marvellous thing, and they'd be as wrong as any Indians who think the Raj was good for India....... I've not read or heard the opinions of any of them, btw.
You are entirely welcome to your opinion, Bromley, that's fine, but we could go on and on about this for a long time if you like. Before I turned my hand to organic gardening and matters sustainable I was an academic, Modern History PhD, and my specialism was British imperialism. My rantings on this subject are not just the random meanderings of a mad lefty, but the result of quite a lot of work on the subject, not to mention thousands and thousands of lines of spilled ink. |
I don't dispute the basic thesis that British rule was bad for India. The facts are that India was vastly wealthier than Britain when the East India Company started, and by the time we left India was poverty struck while we were one of the top 5 economies in the world.
But the OP asks why there was such violence after partition (and could have mentioned several India-Pakistan wars, the war between (West) Pakistan and East Pakistan/Bangladesh, the Sri Lankan civil war, the military regime in Burma and repression of minorities in that country- Sri Lanka and Burma being part of the Raj - and communal violence not only in India but between different varieties of Muslim in Pakistan and Bangladesh right up to date.) He specifically asks why this would be if everyone was getting along fine before partition.
In many ways the exploitation of India by the British is a side issue to all this. How the hell does anyone think those feeble and backward Brits took over wealthy and sophisticated India in the first place? It was undoubtedly because India at that point was riven by religious, caste and other divisions, just as the caste divisions were undoubtedly decisive in the success of waves of Muslim invaders (who of course allowed escape from the caste system by conversion to Islam, since all muslims are members of the 'umma.) Remember that those muslim invaders came from central Asian deserts yet conquered much wealthier Hindu societies, exactly as the British did. The vast majority of "British" troops in the conquest of India were of course Indian, and in fact there were remarkably few battles compared to the area conquered - why was this? Divide and rule yes, but the point is that the divisions were long standing and not created by the British.
Nor do I think it plausible that all the communal problems extant in India today are the fault of the British 70 years after we left - Modhi and his pals are India's creation not ours.
I will certainly agree that the separation of Pakistan from India increasingly looks an error, Pakistan being pretty much a failed state and Bangladesh going the same way, and you have to wonder whether if India had stayed united whether it would have forced a more tolerant nation to develop. (The again, maybe it would have been another Iraq, where we took the opposite approach.) And I think it is certainly the case that in the last decades of British rule the Brits encouraged Muslim separatism to give us an excuse for hanging on to power after 1918. | | | |
| India / Pakistan Partition 1947 on 22:15 - Aug 16 with 4451 views | TheBlob |
Suttee and Thugee. |  |
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| India / Pakistan Partition 1947 on 22:15 - Aug 16 with 4450 views | TheBlob |
Railways, roads, canals, mines, sewers, plantations,law,universities,museums,cartography.... [Post edited 16 Aug 2017 22:22]
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| India / Pakistan Partition 1947 on 23:35 - Aug 16 with 4371 views | 18StoneOfHoop |
| India / Pakistan Partition 1947 on 13:03 - Aug 16 by BromleyHoop |
Could it not be argued then that the Raj largely kept the lid on all the sectarian violence regardless of the how's and why's and even before we'd left it erupted again. Surely partitioning the country was therefor a sensible option to try to keep the communities apart and from killing each other? Literally drawing a line in the sand. |
It does seem somewhat analagous to the Balkan situation where post WW2 it was Strong man Tito keeping the lid on Serb,Croat and Albanian communal strife and hatred and attempted genocide breaking out. When he died,when the Brits left India,hell breaks out.
Churchill - viz keeping influence in Greece western orbit viz sacrificing Poland to Uncle Joe - and Mountbatten very insensitive injudicious poor at delineating artificial straight borders on a map. Many died because of this. [Post edited 17 Aug 2017 0:18]
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| 'I'm 18 with a bullet.Got my finger on the trigger,I'm gonna pull it.."
Love,Peace and Fook Chelski!
More like 20StoneOfHoop now.
Let's face it I'm not getting any thinner.
Pass the cake and pies please. |
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| India / Pakistan Partition 1947 on 00:11 - Aug 17 with 4326 views | Benny_the_Ball |
| India / Pakistan Partition 1947 on 21:38 - Aug 16 by kropotkin41 |
There are many British people who still believe that the British Empire was a marvellous thing, and they'd be as wrong as any Indians who think the Raj was good for India....... I've not read or heard the opinions of any of them, btw.
You are entirely welcome to your opinion, Bromley, that's fine, but we could go on and on about this for a long time if you like. Before I turned my hand to organic gardening and matters sustainable I was an academic, Modern History PhD, and my specialism was British imperialism. My rantings on this subject are not just the random meanderings of a mad lefty, but the result of quite a lot of work on the subject, not to mention thousands and thousands of lines of spilled ink. |
Regardless I know of many Indians who would disagree with you. No disrespect but I value their opinion more despite your academic specialism. And I won't be buying into the BBC's latest attempts to wreak shame on Britain. |  | | |
| India / Pakistan Partition 1947 on 00:12 - Aug 17 with 4324 views | Brightonhoop |
| India / Pakistan Partition 1947 on 18:45 - Aug 16 by johncharles |
We put Mountbatten in charge. A well connected man of wealth and privilege and the brains of a lugworm.
He made a complete arse of it. |
It's well documented he buggered a few boys along the way and May lost the subsequent files whilst at the Home Office, completely corrupting the peedo enquiry into the Establishment. Horrific how the past works into the 21st century but not surprising.
I dont know enough to comment tbh, and always found Rushdie unreadable. A mate used to go out there every winter 25 years ago, and I remember him relaying a conversation from a local who was sad to see the Raj fall as he recalled it as a time of peace. Anecdotal certainly.
The border is now brimming with nukes. Didn't Clinton have to make an emergency intervention in the 90's to prevent thermo nuclear war, I seem to recall? 70 years on from a artition i little understand, but which looks as succesful as Israel, is it not a blessing Brits have less to do with world affairs? Our history elsewhere is both glorious and inglorious. Scots Parliament will not release Charles' interfering letters currently so we are no closer to nailing down the peeds in the establishment all these decades on. |  | | |
| India / Pakistan Partition 1947 on 00:58 - Aug 17 with 4268 views | kensalriser |
| India / Pakistan Partition 1947 on 00:11 - Aug 17 by Benny_the_Ball |
Regardless I know of many Indians who would disagree with you. No disrespect but I value their opinion more despite your academic specialism. And I won't be buying into the BBC's latest attempts to wreak shame on Britain. |
Because there's nothing bad about invading a country, colonising it, subjugating its people and appropriating its resources to enrich yourself. They were lucky to have us! | |
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| India / Pakistan Partition 1947 on 01:05 - Aug 17 with 4267 views | stowmarketrange |
After viewing the BBC programs over the last couple of weeks it seems to have mainly caused by the rush for us to leave India.We brought forward the deadline by several months which meant that the various religious groups had less time to travel to safer areas.
Add in the fact of a tit for tat mentality over numerous atrocities on all sides and it was a powder keg waiting for the right sparks.
Our soldiers didn't exactly rush to stop the killings either. |  | | |
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