Divided Lands, Phantom Limbs: Partition in the Indian Subcontinent, Palestine, China, and Korea

Abstract

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. …