demons of the punjab

As noted last time, through its strategy – deliberate or not – of eloquent silence, ‘Demons of the Punjab’ almost says that Partition represents the British in India killing millions.  It establishes that the British are the ones drawing lines and then running away.  Later, the Thijarians say “Millions will die.” The episode aligns the parts of a statement… but never quite joins them up.

In a way this is fair enough, since the statement it never quite makes is both true and an oversimplification. Like many simple truths, it is one important part of a complex reality.   It is true that the British authorities didn’t mean to cause the horrors of Partition, didn’t themselves take part in the atrocities, and didn’t foresee them. It is true that most of the violence was committed by Indians attacking other Indians.  It is true that there has been – both before and after Partition – plenty of violence between Hindus, Muslims, and the other ethnicities in India.  It is true that intractable political arguments and gameplay between the Indian parties – mainly Congress and the Muslim League – helped stymie British attempts to avoid Partition.  It is true that the Muslims had real and understandable concerns about their future in a Hindu-dominated independent India, not least because of fascistic Hindu movements, with which some upper-caste Hindus in the nationalist movement had ties.  Such fascistic elements were involved in organising the violence of Partition as we saw last time. 

(Sadly, India today is still cursed with such things.  India’s current Prime Minister, Modi, is the authoritarian leader of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), a right-wing Hindu nationalist party, and a member of the BJP’s ‘core cadre’, the right-wing paramilitary Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS).  There are terrifying concerns about the rise of state-sponsored, racist, right-wing authoritarianism in India today that most of us here in the West have, with Eurocentric purblindness, failed to pay enough attention to as we gaze with horror at our domestic monsters as if they’re the only ones that matter.  For more about the RSS, their foundational role in Modi’s politics, their involvement in the violence of Partition, and their connections to Congress, please see here.  I’m indebted for this link, and for other suggestions, to TobermorianSass via the ever-wonderful Sam Keeper.)

All that being said, it is also the case that the explosion of violence and displacement in Partition was foreseeable, and that the inevitability was there for the British to see and understand, had they only cared to do so, or ever bothered to install a proper government in India, as opposed to a vast system of bureaucracy designed to give lucrative careers to English public school boys.  Mountbatten – a well-meaning but vain and ostentatious man who made a fetish of decisiveness – recklessly brought forward the date of Partition by about ten months so that it would happen on the anniversary of him accepting the surrender of Japanese forces in Asia. Even so, the timetable he was given was already rushed.…

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The historian Yasmin Khan, who wrote a book about the Partition of India that Vinay Patel, the writer of ‘Demons of the Punjab’, has tweeted about having read as research, wrote that the Partition is “a history layered with absence and silences”.

Yes, her name is Yasmin Khan.   

What does that mean?  Does it mean anything?  We must simply add this to the list of questions ‘Demons of the Punjab’ raises, or almost raises, and then remains silent about. 

‘Demons of the Punjab’ is an episode haunted by silences.  Pregnant, eloquent silences. I don’t know if this is deliberate, in the sense of being a conscious strategy on the part of the people who made it.  Whether this matters is itself a question to consider.

The first pregnant, eloquent silence comes very near the start, when the elderly Umbreen remarks that she was “the first Muslim woman to work in a textile mill in South Yorkshire”.  This follows her remark, itself news to Yaz, that she was the first woman married in Pakistan. Umbreen has been very silent for a long time.

Contrary to myth and apologia, India before the British came was a wealthy, thriving country.  According to Shashi Tharoor in his book Inglorious Empire, “At the beginning of the eighteenth century, as the British economic historian Angus Maddison has demonstrated, India’s share of the world economy was 23 per  cent, as large as all of Europe put together”.

As he goes on to say:

Britain’s Industrial Revolution was built on the destruction of India’s thriving manufacturing industries. Textiles were an emblematic case in point: the British systematically set about destroying India’s textile manufacturing and exports, substituting Indian textiles by British ones manufactured in England. Ironically, the British used Indian raw material and exported the finished products back to India and the rest of the world, the industrial equivalent of adding insult to injury.

The British destruction of textile competition from India led to the first great deindustrialization of the modern world.

It is tempting to quote Tharoor’s devastating description of the cynical and violent methods by which this was achieved at length… but it would be hard to know where to begin or stop.  People who want the grisly details can read his book. (I highly recommend it. I have nitpicks with Tharoor, but overall his book is a brilliant and accessible introduction to the forgotten horrors of the British Empire in India, as well as a demolition of the more popular apologias.)

Britain’s industrial revolution was funded by the deindustrialisation of India, and textiles were a big part of how and why it worked.  (As we know, the British textile business was also dependant upon cotton produced by slaves in the Americas.)

By the way, another industry at which the pre-colonial Indians excelled as steel production.  The British hijacked that too, having destroyed the Indian industry. Sheffield became best known as a British centre of steel production, becoming known as ‘the steel city’.  Lest we imagine that ‘the British’ benefited from this as an abstract category, it’s worth remembering how “extraordinarily injurious” the work of being a steel-grinder in the Sheffield cutlery industry was, as Engels put it in his 1844 book The Condition of the Working Class in England.…

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