Divided lands, phantom limbs: partition in the Indian subcontinent, Palestine, China, and Korea.

• Author: Greenberg, Jonathan D.

A healthy nation is as unconscious of its nationality as a healthy man of his bones. But if you break a nation's nationality it will think of nothing else but getting it set again. It will listen to no reformer, to no philosopher, to no preacher, until the demand of the Nationalist is granted. It will attend to no business, however vital, except the business of unification and liberation.

George Bernard Shaw, Preface to John Bull's Other Island, 1904 (1)

In the immediate wake of Allied victory in the Second World War, the world lay in pieces. In Western but not Eastern Europe, battered nations and peoples that had been conquered by Axis powers regained their sovereignty and self-determination. In territories throughout Asia, particularly those that had been long subject to Japanese or European colonial control, the war's end undermined civil order and domestic security that had been previously imposed by external forces. Rival groups confronted each other with increasing violence--each seeking to define the national identity of their people, and to establish long-awaited national liberation on their own terms. These groups often had no choice but to await fateful decisions by foreign leaders in Washington, Moscow, London, or Paris. (2)

In a number of important cases, the victorious powers sought to manage extraordinarily difficult problems of postwar governance, civil strife, and territorial boundaries by dividing previously-unified lands. This essay remembers the partition of land by ethnicity in the Indian Subcontinent and in Palestine in 1947-48 following the collapse of British control, and the division of territory by Cold War political affiliations and ideology in Korea and China in the years following Japan's defeat.

In each of these cases, partition involved the creation of new boundaries and borders: new lines on a new map, new citizens of new states. But geographical division severed the already tenuous fabric of social relations, and unprecedented political achievement arrived with overwhelming human catastrophe. This is why Mahatma Gandhi called partition "vivisection": the carving-up of the body politic, the bloody dismemberment of the motherland. Truncated landscapes, lost to political enemies or abandoned by the mass exodus of refugees, became "phantom limbs" in a nation's identity. Severed more than five decades ago, they have not ceased to generate pain and trouble. By examining partitions generated in the immediate postwar period, and comparing them across national borders and regional distances, I hope to suggest an expanded framework in which these cataclysmic events, and their unresolved legacy, can be more effectively addressed.

BRITISH DECOLONIZATION/ETHNIC PARTITION

We British are no more suited in India than in Palestine by nature, by upbringing and by our system of government and way of life, to deal with intemperate, cruel and foolish outbreaks of violence. We have given in and have drawn out of both countries. Intemperate people must be dealt with by more severe, perhaps intemperate, measures than we British are accustomed to use. General Francis Tuker, While Memory Serves British control over India and Palestine began to erode long before the last Viceroy and High Commissioner finally lowered the Union Jack. In retrospect, Ireland's 1921 partition (and Irish bloodshed from the 1916 Easter Rising through the 1922-23 civil war) foreshadowed the collapse of British rule, and its consequences, in both territories. As in Ireland, protests, terror, ethnic violence, and rioting in the Subcontinent and in the Holy Land eventually dissolved the will of colonial administrators and the appetite for empire back home.

Mohammed Ali Jinnah had formally declared the objective of establishing an independent Pakistan in his Presidential Address to the Muslim League in March 1940. But Jinnah's intentions and strategy were ambiguous, and the Indian National Congress held out for a unified state. A tumultuous political struggle ensued in which British intermediaries sought repeatedly to negotiate agreement. In June 1946, Jinnah and the League accepted a British Cabinet mission proposal for a unified federalist India as a less-worse alternative to a "moth-eaten" Pakistan without intact Bengali and Punjabi provinces. But the plan was effectively sabotaged promptly thereafter by Nehru's implicit threats to seize more power for the Congress in a unified government. In response, on 27 July, Jinnah repudiated the agreement, and mass rioting ensued. (3)

"You cannot in any case have a secure base on top of a wasps' nest," wrote Hugh Dalton, chancellor to the exchequer, to Prime Minister Attlee on 11 August 1947. Dalton was referring to Palestine. (4) But his analogy also reflected British sentiment about its Indian crown jewel, abandoned just four days later. General Tuker's memoir calls 1947 "the year of quittance." (5) On 20 February Attlee announced that Britain would withdraw from India on or before June of the following year. Five days later, the United Kingdom officially handed over the problem of Palestine to the United Nations.

On 22 March Lord Louis Francis (Dickie) Mountbatten arrived in Delhi, as the 34th and last Viceroy of the Raj, with a mandate "to wind up the 182-year-old British Indian Empire in fifteen months." (6) By then it had become clear that the territory would indeed be partitioned along ethnic lines. Civil society faced "signs of imminent disintegration"; "law and order became practically non-existent over large tracts of the sub-continent." (7) In response to the escalating chaos, Mountbatten suddenly announced that the date of British withdrawal would be moved forward, by 10 months, to 15 August--little more than ten weeks hence. "In spite of the fact that nothing was prepared and no one was ready," writes Akbar Ahmed, "London agreed." (8)

"At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom." So "at the stroke of the midnight hour" on 14 August Jawaharlal Nehru declared, on behalf of the Indian National Congress, the fulfillment of India's awakening "to life and freedom." But the Indian nation's "tryst with destiny," and Pakistan's simultaneous birth, came at an extraordinarily high cost.

By all accounts, the scale of human migration, communal riots, and mass killing triggered by partition was unimaginably vast. In the first 1953 issue of this journal, William Henderson describes "the holocaust of burning communal hate that followed the decision of the British Raj to transfer sovereignty to two independent states, rather than to a united India." (9) Henderson maps out the "contagion of fear" that spread from Punjab to the North West Frontier, Baluchistan, Karachi, Sind, the Bahawalpur State, and East Bengal--where non-Muslims fled toward India; and to Kashmir, Delhi (and surrounding areas) and other parts of Northern India, and later Hyderabad, where Muslims sought refuge in the emerging state of Pakistan. He estimates that "by November 21, 1947, only three months after partition, some 8 million evacuees had crossed the India-West Pakistan border in both directions" and "by the first anniversary of partition the total stood at approximately 12 million." Thousands of rapes and abductions were perpetrated on Hindu, Muslim, and Sikh women. (10)

On 29 November the UN General Assembly passed a resolution calling for partition in Palestine. The UN-endorsed plan envisioned the creation of two independent, democratic states: one Jewish (5,700 square miles for approximately 600,000 Jews, although that territory included approximately 500,000 Palestinian Arabs) and one Arab (4,300 square miles for the remaining 900,000 Palestinians and Bedouins), with Jerusalem and Bethlehem under international control. The Jewish Agency officially accepted the UN plan; the Palestinian Arabs, and the surrounding Arab states, rejected it. Jewish paramilitary groups (the Irgun and Stern Gang) also opposed the plan. "No one believed in the UN's map," concludes Israeli historian Tom Segev; "everyone knew there would be war." (11)

Following Britain's 4 December announcement that it would be leaving Palestine within six months, "it was as if on a signal Arabs and Jews squeezed the trigger and exchanged fire." (12) As they had done on the subcontinent, British troops in Palestine stood aside as communal violence intensified. Right on schedule, on the morning of 14 May His Majesty's last High Commissioner for Palestine, Lieutenant General Sir Alan Cunningham departed from Jerusalem. Just hours later, as Cunningham sailed off in the HMS Euryalus from the bay of Haifa for England, Ben Gurion proclaimed the establishment of the State of Israel. On the following day, the armies of Egypt, Transjordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq and a contingent force from Saudi Arabia joined indigenous Palestinian and volunteer Arab League forces in a poorly-coordinated and ultimately failed effort to destroy the Jewish state. The war cost Israel roughly 6,000 lives, about one percent of the total Jewish population.

Between 600,000 and 760,000 Palestinian Arabs became refugees in a mass exodus of various stages triggered by multiple causes in combination and degree that differed radically from region to region, if not from village to village, including the pressures of accumulated deprivations, the desire to protect family members in the face of the escalating war, and a "psychosis of flight" triggered by the witnessing of fleeing neighbors and the "general sense" of Arab Palestine's collapse. Dominant Israeli narratives emphasize the early departure of wealthy families with second homes outside Palestine; evacuation orders from Arab commanders and pleas of local Palestinian Arab leaders; pledges by the grand mufti and other influential religious and secular Arab leaders that the Jews would be exterminated or forced off the land; and the near-unanimous belief that an anticipated...