Sixty years on, we have barely begun to deal with our collective guilt from the events of Partition. By Anirudh K Kala, Alok Sarin and Sanjeev Jain

By : Anirudh K Kala, Alok Sarin and Sanjeev Jain

satish gujral

The evolution of psychiatry as a discipline, and the idea of self-awareness as a subject of medical and psychological inquiry, has been relatively recent. The development of psychological concepts about the individual psyche coincided with the development of ‘nationalism’ in the political sphere. Events of the recent past (the Holocaust, the Israel-Palestine conflict and other so-called ‘clashes’ of civilisation) are often debated in the battlefields of the mind as much as in physical territories. The notion of modernity – a multi-nuanced, multifaceted persona – at times gets hijacked by traumatic events, trapped in roles and identities that are at odds with an overall understanding of ‘humanity’.

In the Southasian context, a complex, interdependent social structure was torn apart with Partition. In recent history, Partition was second only to the Holocaust in the number of dead, with the essential difference being that while the Holocaust occurred over a period of five years, the cataclysm of Partition occurred within five weeks. This fact in itself perhaps demonstrates the social-psychological impact of Partition.

By the time of Partition, the departing British were hardly in the proper mindset to apply themselves to the onerous task at hand. As Major-General Shahid Hamid noted in his Partition memoirs Disastrous Twilight, “The British are a just people. They have left India in exactly the same state of chaos as they found it.” A piece of meat is generally carved with more patience than what was exhibited in the subsequent cutting-up of the huge, throbbing Subcontinent, then populated by half a billion people. Cyril Radcliffe, a barrister with no cartographic experience, was given six weeks to complete the task. He worked on the basis of an imperfect population count that had been conducted in 1943, and with an advisory panel that was already disastrously divided along religious lines. During World War II, Radcliffe had been the Director-General of the Ministry of Information in London, and his first duty in the new assignment was to preserve the interests of the colonial power. Nonetheless, Radcliffe was so afraid of the ramifications of his work – worried even that Hindus, Muslims or Sikhs would kill him – that he hastily left India, destroyed all of his records, and stayed far from the Subcontinent for the rest of his life.

The British were not only impatient to leave, but also callous; now that they had nothing to gain from the Subcontinent, they proved indifferent. Much worse is the possibility that they saw the riots coming, and still did not care. How else can one explain the withdrawal of 14,000 British servicemen in such unseemly haste just before Partition, at a time when they were not needed back home, with the war having ended two years earlier? Churchill himself admitted, referring to the decision to accelerate the British withdrawal: “A hasty exit will bring a terrible name to Britain. The shameful flight could result in chaos and carnage. Would it not be a world crime that would stain our name forever?”

Added to this was the ease with which the local leaders let primeval emotions (and identities) justify barbaric actions – and most surprisingly, and tragically, the absence of any regret or reparation, or a willingness to learn from the experience. But even while apportioning blame for the chaos on Britain, we cannot forget that, of the million people killed during Partition, the British did not kill any. We, the people of India and Pakistan and modern-day Bangladesh, killed them. And we feel guilty, because guilt is multiplied several times over when you kill people you love, or with whom you have an ambivalent relationship. As if to prove the point, there were countless people on both sides who saved each other.

Regardless of the books written and films made about Partition, to a great degree Indians and Pakistanis have never worked through this monumental guilt, nor the other complex, concurrent emotions. Rather, we continue to love and hate each other through petty sibling rivalry and dangerous wars. Unlike individuals who have gone through the stages of ‘grief work’ – which typically involves the stages of denial, anger, bargaining, depression and then acceptance – when confronted by catastrophe and trauma, as communities we have never had a ‘grief reaction’. Although at the individual level, we have rebuilt our worlds, and have on the surface appeared to have come to terms with Partition, our collective unconscious on both sides still brims with mutual suspicion. Not surprisingly, when compared to the myriad memorials to the Holocaust scattered in various places around the globe, there is not a single memorial to the dead of Partition, anywhere. Perhaps it is time to consider one, to facilitate a sense of closure to the trauma (see box, “Lest we forget”).

The ‘native mind’
During the 17th century, the Mughal Empire of the Subcontinent was idealised as cosmopolitan, and commentators (such as one published in a small anonymous pamphlet from the early 17th century, available at the Cambridge Library) satirically contrasted this harmony with the religious strife and intolerance of Europe. However, during the following two centuries, this respect was slowly replaced with a construct of the ‘native mind’, one that was defined as superstitious, barbaric and incapable of deep psychological or political thought.

It is assumed that the individual derives importance as a social being from collective identity; and deprived of a collective identity, the individual loses individual integrity. The destruction of established social identities and the creation of new collective identities thus become an extension of psychological awareness (with all its conscious and unconscious drives and prejudices). However, ‘modern’ views of human psychology emphasise the universal transcendent ‘truth’ about self-actualisation and self-growth. Attempts to ensure that opportunities for such self-actualisation exist for all individuals in all cultures and contexts, as derived from liberal, humanistic and secular trends in 20th-century thought, underlies most contemporary social and political structures.

In academic psychiatry, this raises particular questions. While the dominant theme of ‘modernity’ in psychiatry is shared across the world, the perspective of inflexible collective identities is often used to demonise the ‘other’ as being primitive and opaque. This subsequently sets the groundwork to see the other community as difficult to understand and, ultimately, non-desirable. This process of dividing minds (Muslim-Hindu, Serbo-Croat, Jew-non-Jew, Catholic-Protestant) is then used to justify physical separation.

These processes are not accidental. A psychiatrist who reviewed the writings of colleagues from Yugoslavia came to the uncomfortable realisation that even psychiatric professionals often adopted parochial attitudes in their work – describing the ‘other’ community as having a faulty ego structure, talking of the repression of guilt and anger for historical wrongs. In short, they were subverting the language of psychoanalysis to justify psychological incompatibility. This provided ‘scientific credibility’ to the eventual partition of the land. It is no coincidence that conflicts are ongoing in these very territories.

Unfortunately, in the current discourse as it is, a ‘civilised’ Southasian past is regarded as superior to the current chaos, peopled by unruly mobs incapable of mature reflection or action. As such, all concepts of psychological validity in the region (often developed in purely Western psychological terms) become, at one level, those of an outsider. There is a near-complete neglect and non-recognition of the ‘psychological space’ in the Southasian population, partly due to a residue of the colonial legacy of medical and psychological education and training, which is still suspicious of the ‘native mind’. Thus, there is almost no effort to relate the problems people face as psychological responses to contemporary social change (for instance, issues of poverty, discrimination, gender and the like) and political conflict. Even a traumatic event, such as Partition, has never been followed up with the kind of attention with which, for instance, post-traumatic stress disorder has been evaluated in the context of the European Holocaust, even to the extent of affecting the children of the survivors.

As psychiatrists in the region meet and talk 60 years after Partition, the consensus emerges that the sorrows and joys of our peoples are much the same, helped by the same gestures, the same kindnesses, the same systems of support. And our problems in addressing these also stem from the same issues: lack of health care, rapid pace of social change, increasing rates of ennui and desperation. Thus, there is a need to develop an alternative paradigm to what has unfortunately become a Western notion of modernity. With our complex weave of cultures and societies, Southasia needs to develop an indigenous model of modernity. For a start, we need to learn from the experiences of Partition, to reconcile to the events of the past, and to develop a confident and assured individual and social persona. This is the only way to ensure that further partitions of our lands, hearts and minds do not become tragedies that repeat themselves.

Illusions of independence

With the 150th anniversary of India’s First War of Independence just past, it is worth remembering the country’s historical interface with psychiatry. The Asylum of Delhi lay in the path of the mutineers marching towards Delhi from Meerut. On 11 May 1857, at the very beginning of the ‘Mutiny’, it was sacked and burned. All 110 inmates escaped, and were never found. The asylum appears to have been situated just outside the ramparts of Delhi, in Daryaganj, close to the jail and Feroze Shah’s tomb, perhaps on the grounds of the present-day Maulana Azad Medical College.

The political impact of the sacking of the asylum and the release of its patients remains unclear. In France, the sacking of the Bastille, for instance, is celebrated as the founding of the Republic. But perhaps the sacking of an asylum by ‘natives’ is not thought to have the same significance; even today, after all, asylum inmates are often thought to lack the requisite notions of liberty, equality and fraternity.

In the immediate aftermath of the building’s destruction, however, a temporary shelter was rented near Kashmiri Gate – a stable, where a station now stands for the new metro. The authorities eventually ruled that not only had the stable been fraudulently rented out (resulting in isappropriation of funds), but that it was unsuitable for human habitation. Although plans for a new asylum were drawn up, to be constructed on the opposite bank of the Jamuna River (near the village of Shahdara), these were shelved as the edge of the empire moved to Lahore, and with it the asylum. While New Delhi was being rebuilt, most of the expense was in building offices, and funds for the New Delhi asylum had to wait until after Independence, when the Shahdara Asylum finally came into being.

Clinical descriptions of patients from the time are particularly illuminating. In 1877, an Irish soldier, who claimed to be a general, was described as claiming that the government had stolen his pay and share of the war booty, spending it on oranges. (The Mutiny had resulted in an ‘official loot’ of 3.5 million rupees, independent of all personal looting, and was to be shared with every soldier.) The soldier had converted to Islam at the Jama Masjid, and taken the name Ahmed Din. He said he was on his way to Kabul, as the Russians were expected to help the Muslims to overthrow the British. He exhorted Muslims to unite, to ready themselves for the event, and to meet the Russians in Peshawar. He was declared insane, but this caused riots, as it was widely believed that he had been labeled so for deciding to convert from Christianity to Islam. The soldier was quickly shipped back to England by the authorities.

In the consciousness of the rulers, it must be recalled, the events of 1857 had become a ‘Muslim uprising’, though in truth it was categorically a joint Hindu-Muslim effort to oust an unfair rule. Also, by 1877, the British were already engaged with what was being referred to as the ‘Muslim problem’ in Afghanistan, so mass delusions such as the Irish soldier’s were particularly dangerous (as they continue to be today).

The idea of Indian independence also seems to have recurred fairly early in the delusions of psychiatric patients. Nicholson, the famous Irish officer who marched from the Punjab to Delhi to put down the mutiny, was accosted by a soldier in his own army one morning, berating him for being an unnecessary interloper in Indian affairs. Nicholson shot him dead. The killing was officially dismissed, with the soldier declared insane. After all, he had been urging Indian independence and driving out the British.

In 1861, a British soldier passing through the town of Bareilly visited the local asylum. There he was confronted by a patient, who called himself a pundit, who talked so fast and long as to the destruction of the Europeans in India that one would almost credit him with sanity, were he not known to be otherwise; vehement in his manner of delivery as to his determination in regard to all white faces, he certainly must have had some knowledge of what had transpired in the mutiny, and as we saw that he desired to continue his conversation on that topic the warder cut him short by ordering him into his cell and locking him up.

In contrast, another patient wanted to help Queen Victoria, by interceding in the North West Frontier Provinces, and to rule Kabul on her behalf. Still another Indian patient, in the Delhi Asylum in 1883, claimed that he was a descendant of the Sen Dynasty, which ruled Bengal during the 11th and 12th centuries. He said that he had leased India on contract to the British for 80 years, after which he would divide it between the Russians and the Chinese (perhaps predicting the historical split between the Marxists and the Maoists of the 1960s). Thus, conversions, corruption and the ‘foreign hand’ were all represented in the asylums of India more than a hundred years ago. Now that all of these are commonly held beliefs, one could safely assume that we have all gone mad!

Sanjeev Jain

This box is drawn from the writer’s research into documents at the India Office Records at the British Library, London.