George Orwell, in a letter dated 1944:
"Already history has in a sense ceased to exist, ie. there is no such
thing as a history of our own times which could be universally accepted,
and the exact sciences are endangered as soon as military necessity
ceases to keep people up to the mark. Hitler can say that the Jews
started the war, and if he survives that will become official history."
Dr B R Ambedkar:
" The ideal which a historian should place
before himself has been well defined by Goethe who said : "The historian's duty is to separate the true from the false, the
certain from the uncertain, and the doubtful from that which cannot be accepted ... ...
Every investigator must before all things look upon himself as one who is summoned to
serve on a jury. He has only to consider how far the statement of the case is complete and
clearly set forth by the evidence. Then he draws his conclusion and gives his vote,
whether it be that his opinion coincides with that of the foreman or not."
There can be no difficulty in giving effect to
Goethe's direction when the relevant and necessary facts are forthcoming. All this advice
is of course very valuable and very necessary. But Goethe does not tell what the historian
is to do when he comes across a missing link, when no direct evidence of connected
relations between important events is available."
William Dalrymple:
"The
report, entitled 'On the Post-Operation Polo Massacres, Rape and
Destruction or Seizure of Property in Hyderabad State', makes grim
reading. In village after village across the state, it meticulously and
unemotionally catalogues incidents of murder and mass rape, sometimes
committed by troops, in other cases by local Hindu hooligans after the
troops had disarmed the Muslim population...In all, the report estimates
that as many as two hundred thousand Hyderabadi Muslims were
slaughtered, which, if true, would make the aftermath of the 'Police
Action' a bloodbath comparable to parts of the Punjab during Partition.
Even if one chooses to regard the figure of two hundred thousand dead as
an impossible exaggeration, it is still clear that
the scale of the killing was horrific...."
('The Age of Kali', 1998)
Anthony Pagden:
"...Not only has the Oxford school of history squandered its pre-eminence: history in general has retreated into the ivory tower, or lies rolling in the gutter..."
('Decline and Fall of the History Men', Standpoint, July/August 2013)
A G Noorani, Frontline, March 16 2001:
"...The Sundarlal Report is of more than historical importance; it is of
current relevance, for the massacres, coupled with the national
indifference to them, have left scars in the minds of Muslims in the
State, Hyderabad city in particular. And some Muslim
communal parties have not been slow to exploit these scars."
Faiz Ahmad Faiz, 'Subh-e-Azadi':
“Yeh daghdar ujala yeh shab gazida sahr, woh intizar tha jiska woh yeh sahr to nahin”
(This stain-covered daybreak, this night-bitten dawn. This dawn is not that dawn we craved for)
Saadat Hasan Manto:
"...literature gives news about the nation, the community to which it belongs, its health, its illness. Stretch your hand and pick up any dustladen book from an old shelf – the pulse of a bygone era will begin to beat under your finger-tips."
I have been harsh on
Nizams of
Hyderabad on this blog.
It has been largely because of historian, scholar, polyglot and senior civil servant
the late Setu Madhavrao Pagdi’s, 27/8/1910- 14/10/1994 (सेतु माधवराव पगडी) autobiography-
Jeevansetu (जीवनसेतु), 1969 where he describes
the last days of the Nizam regime as he watched them being posted in Hyderabad as a civil servant.
It is also because of what I heard about the regime in the speeches of
the late Narhar Kurundkar, 15/7/32-10/2/82 (नरहर कुरुंदकर) in the late 1970's and
T S Shejwalkar's (त्र्यं शं शेजवलकर) radio-talk mentioned
here.
In January 2013, I heard from my wife's aunt- borne in c1932 in
Gulbarga district, (now) Karnataka- the kind of terror
Razakars, a private militia of Nizam, unleashed upon the Hindus in 1947-48. Her own family went through 'hell' in those months.
There
is no doubt in my mind that Nizam's was a bad and cruel regime. Some
horrific things were done to the Hindus during its rule and many more
would have been done, had it stayed in the office.
But did I know the whole truth about
the Hyderabad Police Action (HPA) of September 1948 aka 'Operation Polo' and its aftermath?
No, I did not.
I continue with my wife's aunt's account.
Her Brahmin family had to leave their native and migrate to a Hindu refugee camp near Solapur (सोलापूर) in 1948. When they returned after HPA, they had lost a lot including cattle, crop, some valuables etc. This was the story of the most of the Hindu families from her village.
But once they returned they themselves unleashed a reign of terror on the Muslims they could locate.
According to her, her own father killed a Muslim, they knew well, with a sword. Apparently, he was seated in a chair, garlanded, given a cup of tea and then executed as he was crying for mercy all along.
For all such acts, all the Hindu able-bodied men from the village were summoned so that no single one of them could later be identified for this. She also said that even Muslim women and children were not spared.
I asked the old lady if her father ever regretted what he did until his death. Her answer: Never.
This account is corroborated by Swaminathan S. Anklesaria Aiyar's article in
The Times of India, November 25 2012. You may read it
here and I quote:
"The
Gujarat election will revive charges that
Narendra Modi killed a
thousand Muslims in the 2002 Gujarat riots, with the
BJP accusing
Rajiv
Gandhi of killing 3000
Sikhs in the 1984
Delhi riots. To get a sense of
perspective, I did some research on communal riots in past decades. I
was astounded to find that the greatest communal slaughter occurred
under neither Modi nor Rajiv but
Nehru. His takeover of Hyderabad in
1948 caused maybe 50,000-200,000 deaths...
...Civil rights activist
AG Noorani has cited
Prof Cantwell Smith, a critic
of
Jinnah, in
The Middle Eastern Journal, 1950. “The only careful
report on what happened in this period was made a few months later by
investigators – including a Congress Muslim and a sympathetic and
admired
Hindu (Professor Sunderlal) – commissioned by the Indian
government. The report was submitted but has not been published;
presumably it makes unpleasant reading. It is widely held that the
figure mentioned therein for the number of Muslims massacred is 50,000.
Other estimates by responsible observers run as high as 200,000.”...
....This was the largest single massacre in the history of the
Indian Union,
dwarfing the killings by the
Pathan raiders en route to
Srinagar which
India has ever since used as the casus belli for its annexation of
Kashmir...
...Our textbooks and TV programmes show
Sardar Patel and
Nehru as demi-gods
who created a unified India. The truth is more sordid. You will not
find any mention of the Hyderabad massacre in our standard history books
(just as
Pakistani textbooks have deleted reference to the
East
Pakistan massacre of 1971). The air-brushing of Patel and Nehru is
complete...."
After reading this, I revisited Pagdi's book to find out if he mentions any of this in its intensity and extent.
There are two aspects of this event of September 1948.
1. What would have happened to the Hindus like Pagdi living in
Hyderabad if the military operation had failed?
2. What DID
happen to Muslims of
the then Hyderabad state in real life?
The late S M Pagdi spends considerable time on the first.
On
pages 434-435 (edition 2000) he talks about the bet he took with his
friend on how long the Nizam's administration would be able to fight
India's military. He wins the bet because he proposes the figure of just
four days against his friend's guess of six months. Pagdi then
expresses his pleasure that because of such a quick result, the Hindus
of Hyderabad were not slaughtered by the
Razakars.
No bet was taken by the friends on the fate of Muslims of Andhra Pradesh if Indian military operation did succeed!
On that point, on page 454 of the book, Pagdi briefly mentions:
"युनियन
अधिकार्यांच्या दक्षतेमुळे हैदराबाद शहर सुरक्षित राहिले. तेथे
मुसलमानांच्या केसालाही धक्का लागला नाही. सप्टेम्बर आणि त्यापुढील दोन तीन
महिने हैदराबाद राज्याच्या मध्यवर्ती आणि पश्चिम भागातील जिल्ह्यांत अनेक
मुसलमानांना प्रचंड जनक्षोभाची झळ लागली ...पोलीस एक्शननंतरच्या हिंदूंच्या
प्रतिक्रियेची झळ बऱ्याच जिल्ह्यातील मुसलमानांना लागली होती..."
(Because
of alertness of Union officers, city of Hyderabad remained safe. Not an
hair of Muslims was touched there. During September and following two
three months, Muslims from central and western districts of Hyderabad
state were struck by people's fury....Muslims from a number of districts
were affected by the reaction of the Hindus after the police action.)
Now, I know what that 'reaction', 'fury' was- "50,000-200,000 deaths", " the largest single massacre in the history of the Indian Union", "mass rapes"!
What about 'alertness of Union officers'?
"'How did the Indian Army behave when it got to Hyderabad?' I asked.
'When
an army invades any country - whether it's Alexander the Great, Timur,
Hitler or Mussolini - when it gets into a town, you know what the
soldiery does. It's very difficult for the officers to control them. I
can't tell you how many were raped or killed, but I saw the bodies of
many. Old scores were paid off across the state.'"
(William Dalrymple in conversation with
Mr. Mir Moazam, '
The Age of Kali')
Finally, I turned to internationally celebrated, best selling author/ historian, one of world's leading intellectual
Ramachandra Guha's much praised tome '
India After Gandhi: The History Of The World's Largest Democracy', 2007. (It has been translated into Marathi and the translation's second edition has been released recently.) Mr. Guha's book is a version of India's history after
Mahatma Gandhi's death on January 30 1948.
Had Gandhi lived, he would have once again been on the forefront trying to prevent the bloodshed. In that sense, it was the first major event since the Mahatma's death when he was sorely missed by the minorities.
I thought the book must surely cover the HPA and its aftermath at some length.
The book (my copy) covers it on pages 55-56:
"...But, with (Lord) Mountbatten gone, it became easier for (Sardar) Patel to take decisive action. On 13 September a contingent of Indian troops was sent into Hyderabad. In less than four days they had full control of the state. Those killed in the fighting included forty-two Indian soldiers and two thousand-odd Razakars...."
Not a word on the carnage, 'the largest single massacre in the history of the
Indian Union', that followed in the rest of the state!
Instead he writes this:
"...Whether by accident or design, the Indian action against Hyderabad took place two days after the death of Pakistan’s governor general. Jinnah had predicted that a hundred million Muslims would rise if the Nizam’s state was threatened. That didn’t happen, but in parts of Pakistan feelings ran high. In Karachi a crowd of 5,000 marched in protest to the Indian High Commission. The high commissioner, an old Gandhi an, came out on the street to try to pacify them. ‘You cowards,’ they shouted back, ‘you have attacked us just when our Father has died.’..."
I wonder what has been achieved in giving this information. Jinnah's boastfulness? Indian high commissioner in Karachi was an old Gandhian?
[disclaimer- I went though every single 'Hyderabad' entry listed in the index of the book and did not find what I was looking for. There is a mention of Hindu-Muslim riot of September 1983 in Hyderabad on page 564. My apologies if that information is lurking somewhere else in the book.]
Arundhati Roy has said
: "Ramachandra Guha, liberal historian and founding member of the
New India
Foundation, a corporate-funded trust, advises us in his book—as well as
in a series of highly publicised interviews—that the
Gujarat government
is not really fascist, and the genocide was just an aberration that has
corrected itself after elections." (read Mr. Guha's rejoinder to Ms. Roy's 'charge' at the end of the same article.)
('
Listening To Grasshoppers', February 4 2008)
If so, maybe even Hyderabad massacre was an aberration. Maybe even following lynching was an aberration.
Artist:
Reginald Marsh, The New Yorker, September 8 1934
I did not hear even Kurundkar talk about the
aftermath of HPA.
As I have said elsewhere on the blog, Kurundkar spoke fearlessly about the issues. For instance, he justified India's partition. But then again, he never spoke in detail about its aftermath.
[Disclaimer: I have read a lot but not all of
Kurundkar. For instance, I have not read his '
Hyderabad: Vimochan aani Visarjan' (
हैद्राबाद : विमोचन आणि विसर्जन). Therefore, I don't know if he has written candidly about HPA's aftermath. If he has, I stand corrected and apologise to his memory.]
I still have huge respect for Pagdi's and Kurundkar's scholarships
and their achievements but in my eyes their statures stand reduced by a few inches after listening to my wife's aunt and reading Mr. Aiyar's article and a part of WD's book.
Mr. S S A Aiyar is critical of our textbooks.
But
when are they completely truthful about any topic when it comes to history?
I did not know almost a thing about India's partition when I came out
of secondary school although I knew a lot about India's freedom struggle.
That was in the last century.
One day this century, I read Prof. Indivar Kamtekar's, seminal, kick-in-the-gut essay, 'The Fables of Nationalism'.
"...On 26 November 1947, introducing the first budget of
independent India, the Finance Minister, Shanmukham Chetty, said: `...we have
secured freedom from foreign yoke, mainly through the operation of world
events, and partly through a unique act of enlightened self-abnegation on
behalf of the erstwhile rulers of the country...' His tone was totally different from that of
later generations of politicians...
...As memories faded, and messages about 1947 were addressed
more to children and less to adults, the story became more pliable. Versions of the past became more tractable
with time, when the past was more distant, because they were addressed to a
constituency without any dissonant memories to challenge them. The data needed to dispute an official
version were less readily available.
Imagination was less fettered by fact.
As the
official version of 1947 travelled through the firm channel of formal
education, its current gained speed and strength.
Hitherto carried mainly through conversation,
the 1947 story found its new medium in the more structured hectoring of the
classroom.
The most vivid anecdote must
fail before the most vapid syllabus.
Moreover, the school teacher's cane is an effective weapon in the
armoury of nationalism..."
Do our books and school teachers some times show us the reality like in the picture below?
Artist:
Unknown. The New Yorker, February 19, 1927
(A word on this wonderfully moving cartoon. I keep smiling looking at it. The artist is anonymous. Look at the way the con-artist is pushing the lady down so that she looks through the telescope instead of over it at his hand!)
p.s
A review of A G Noorani's 'The Destruction of Hyderabad' from EPW dated May 31 2014:
"...How then can the Sunderlal Report serve as a starting point for
rethinking the events of 1947-48? How did such a massive event of
violence materialise? How has it remained hidden or denied? For one, it
urges us to rethink events on the ground that provided the context for
the elite negotiations. Specifically, the Sunderlal Report claims that
the “perpetrators” included “individuals and bands of people, with and
without arms, from across the border, who had infiltrated through in the
wake of the Indian Army”, as well as the members of the
Hyderabad State
Congress. Who were these armed men and what were they doing in and
around Hyderabad?
Mobilisation of Violence
Many of them were members of the State Congress, who established
around 79 camps with at least 1,600 men in Indian union territory along
the circumference of Hyderabad. They created “border incidents” by acts
of sabotage, disrupting rail and telegraph lines, and demolishing
customs and police outposts, among other things. This violent campaign
was supported by top Congress leaders such as
Patel, who ordered the
Andhra, Karnataka and Bombay Provincial Congress Committees to aid the
militants and drum up propaganda. Perhaps the most important leader to
emerge from this movement was the future prime minister,
P V Narasimha
Rao.."