Barney White-Spunner

Of all things, I started reading this after seeing the Dr Who episode, Demons of the Punjab, because I wanted to know more about Partition. What I found was a horrifying account of an event that the West seems to have largely forgotten about. In 1947, the British prepared to quit India after 300 years of occupation, however, the subcontinent, hopelessly divided on sectarian grounds, exploded in a frenzy of killing. At the core of the problem was the impassable gulf between the Hindu-dominated Congress, led by Jawarhalal Nehru, and the Muslim League led by Muhammed Ali Jinnah. Nehru wanted a single country under Hindu domination, Jinnah wanted a separate state for Muslims called Pakistan. Complicating the matter even further was Gandhi with his fanatical following, a loose cannon on the fringes of the dispute. Stuck in the middle were the British, the last Viceroys, Wavell and Mountbatten, and the miltary commander Auchinleck, forced to divide his beloved army between Muslim and Hindu. In the end, an arbitrary border was drawn up which satisfied no-one, dividing the provinces of Punjab and Bengal between India and Pakistan. On Independence Day, August 14, the nation exploded in a orgy of bloodletting as millions of people displaced on the wrong side of the religious divide fled their homes. Murderous gangs of Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs butchered anyone in their path who happened to be of the wrong faith. Whole families were burned alive in their homes, women were gang-raped, mutilated and murdered, refugee trains were ambushed and left full of corpses. In the end more than a million died and almost 12 million displaced. A legacy of bitterness was left which stains Hindu-Muslim relations on the sub-continent to this day. This is not a pleasant book to read, the horror is real and all-pervading, but it is an absorbing and informative tale, telling a story that more people need to know about.… (meer)