Independent India, 1947-2000

Wendy Singer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781317876199
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Indian & South Asian History
• Index: History

Independent India is an exploration of India's national history from independence in 1947 to the end of the twentieth century. Wendy Singer charts the rapid development of this emerging world power by following a series of different narratives crucial to the history of post-independence India: national integrations, the ongoing development of arts and culture, social movements, and political change.

In telling the broader history of political movements and cultural transformations from different perspectives, this book provides key examples that demonstrate the experiences of women and men from the many classes and cultures that comprise modern India. In keeping with the series as a whole, this text also provides a range of primary source documents both to illuminate that history and to show the rich resources and unique challenges involved in writing contemporary history.

Key features include:

Thematic chapters within a chronological structure, incorporating different approaches to the study of history
A varied range of primary sources, demonstrating the diversity of material available
In-depth social, cultural and political analysis, including the study of regional identities, film, literature, gender, politics and economic change

Investigating India's recent national history from a range of angles, this new Seminar Studies volume is an essential introduction for anyone who wishes to learn more about the important place that India, the world's largest democracy, has in our global age..

Part 1

ANALYSIS

Introduction

When India achieved independence in 1947, who could imagine the dramatic changes that would take place in the following six decades? In a brief moment of history, India transformed from a British colonial possession to one of the fastest growing economies in the world. At the time of independence, the problems that confronted India of forming a government, dealing with a hostile neighbor, and supporting 360 million people, including refugees, seemed staggering. The literacy rate was 18 per cent in 1951 and nearly 83 per cent of the population lived in villages. In the following decades, it built democratic institutions, a stable economy, and a thriving nation-state. By 2001 the population had trebled and literacy rates increased to 65 per cent. Large numbers of people had left the countryside for cities, so that rural India, which accounted for 83 per cent of the population in 1951, comprised 72 per cent by 2001. Plus India became a global exporter not only of software, textiles, and steel, but also of Bollywood films and prize-winning literature, and had built connections with an influential diasporic community. The interim struggles, the detours and pitfalls, and the remarkable successes make the story of India’s first sixty years a compressed narrative of astonishing development. All this comes from a culturally, linguistically, and religiously diverse nation that still contends with serious economic and social inequalities. Indians deal with these competing realities, through a vibrant political culture that thrives both inside and outside formal institutions.

Bollywood: A genre of formulaic Hindi films characterized by song and dance sequences; as a more general term, it is used to mean India’s Bombay (now call Mumbai) film Industry, hence the name.

And most relevant to our understanding of the contemporary world, as the writer Sunil Khilnani has put it, the challenges we see in India mirror those being addressed every day in other societies around the world.

The themes and conflicts that animate India’s politics today have a surprisingly wide resonance – the assertion of community and group rights and the use of democracy to affirm collective identities; the difficulties of maintaining large-scale multi-cultural political unions; [and] the compulsion to make democracy work despite economic adversity.

(Khilnani, 1999: 8–9)

There is an irony here too, however, because in the 1960s and 1970s India was the object of development not an example of it. Like many other so-called developing countries or Third World countries, India’s progress was measured against the patterns established in the history of older democracies or Western powers. It is indeed a re-imagining of the world for India to suggest models of growth and change and development to other nations.

Any book about India must begin with a range of descriptors that demonstrate the vastness of the land and the diversity of its people. This book is no different and given its chronological task from 1947 to 2000, it is valuable to take a snapshot of this diversity as it appeared at the beginning of the twenty-first century. India in 2001 had 28 states and 7 union territories governed by a mix of national and regional political parties. Its citizens (1.028 billion, according to the 2001 Census) spoke 844 languages and dialects, 22 of which were recognized for legal use in India’s Constitution. Among these were Hindi and its related language Urdu, which were spoken by more than 470 million people. English was the first or second language of about 90 million people as estimated by the English-language news media. India is religiously diverse as well and although the Census showed that about 80 per cent of the population was identified as Hindu, the category of Hindus has a wide range of meanings in different contexts. Also the Census shows 13 per cent of the population to be Muslim, giving India the second largest Muslim population in the world. In addition there are communities of Christians, Sikhs, Jains, Parsis, Buddhists, animist practitioners, and other religious groups as well.

Geographically, India is the seventh largest nation in the world, bordered on the north by the Himalayan Mountains, China, and Nepal and on the West by Pakistan. On both sides of the southern peninsula is the Indian Ocean and the nearest southeastern neighbor is Sri Lanka. On India’s eastern border is Bangladesh and beyond the far eastern Indian States is Burma. The land varies from fertile agricultural land to desert and from tropical jungle to temperate mountain forests. As a result crops and foods also vary from region to region.

This begins to suggest the complexity of the nation, which sometimes easily and sometimes uneasily integrates the various regions and cultures. In fact, the story of national integration is one of the common narrative threads that characterize this period in Indian history. Historical narratives are strongly influenced by the moment in which they are produced. Writing this moment in Indian history has different inflections depending on when we end the story. For example, the year 2004 projected an optimistic narrative – the economy was growing rapidly, a national election – India’s 14th – brought a secular coalition to power, and intellectual, artistic and cultural arenas celebrated new achievements. In the course of this book, however, we will see that this date as a belated ending of the twentieth century was surely not inevitable. If we sliced our history at other moments, we might see communal conflict (that is tension between Hindus and Muslims) as a dominant force in Indian history or political uncertainty that threatened democracy, for example, when Prime Minister Indira Gandhi instituted the Emergency.

So the lesson of this very compressed lightening speed of development is that within just a few decades tens of narratives can be produced, telling the dynamic history of contemporary India. Just as news travels faster today than at any time in the past, so too do the patterns and mechanisms of historical change.

I come to this project as an historian of the twentieth century. Interested in oral histories of peasant movements in the 1930s, I found myself collecting those histories against a backdrop of contemporary politics. In every case, what was going on at the time, influenced people’s telling about the past. And so, through the methodology of oral history, as I heard it, postindependence history became part of the history of the colonial period, not simply the other way around. Therefore, the histories I have written of the post-independence period, for example of elections, take these issues into account. Some of the continuities – perhaps legacies of peasant movements and the Freedom Movement – become clear in this volume. For example, in India, movement politics and social activism have taken place along side parliamentary and institutional politics.

However writing the history of the sixty some years from independence to the end of the twentieth century presents special challenges. As events unfold, the meanings of this recent past change radically and quickly. In addition, while on the one hand there are nearly an overwhelming number of sources of recent history, some of the most useful ones to historians are also the least accessible. For example, government documents remain sealed for forty years and most private papers remain private. Also the actors in this history may continue to be agents of change, leaving each story, to some extent, unfinished. The sense of ongoing transformation, then, infuses each chapter.

The documents provided with this text not only elaborate on the events they describe but also suggest some of the possibilities of sources available for this period. They give a reader the opportunity to analyze different kinds of sources of modern history from court documents to personal narratives to sculpture. The format of a written text such as this, alas, does not allow me to include video and film images. But there are so many that would provide valuable evidence for analysis that they are mentioned in the text. Also the documents and references include a number of analytical sources that have been produced by significant participants in the history they describe. It is especially true of recent history that the words are available of key participants. But it is also true that their interpretations of even their own pasts change over time.

Therefore, a critical part of the task in integrating sources and selecting relevant documents has been seeing the relationships between changes in sources and changes in the phenomena they describe. Most studies of recent periods come from the disciplines of political science, anthropology, or sociology and they are organized thematically, without particular attention to chronology and dates. Therefore, the format of the Seminar Series is particularly valuable for contextualizing these contemporary themes in a broad time line.

The chapters of this book progress thematically and chronologically, focusing on both changes and continuities over time. Since at the core of history are the stories, in some ways each chapter is a collection of interrelated stories of the events and people of the time. As stories unfold, sometimes we have to move back in time or incorporate critical definitions. So the discussion of conflict over a mosque in 1992 requires the stories from ancient times and of medieval emperors.

But this too is a feature of contemporary history. The history of recent events are also for many people this history of recent memory. And when people tell the past they move not chronologically but rather from important theme to important theme. So, this is a hybrid exercise that blends the necessary chronology with the stories of movements, politics, art, and development. What has been critical at every step of the way is to provide rich and vivid examples – specific films, stories, life histories, planned cities, election contests, court cases, etc. These are meant to get beyond the larger narrative and provide texture and palpable reality to the history described.

As with any such project, each revision raises new questions about what is included and what has been excluded. But such is the ongoing process of all history-making, especially, histories of such a contemporary moment.

1

Implementing a secular state

Long years ago we made a tryst with destiny, and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge, not wholly or in full measure, but very substantially. At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom [Doc. 1, pp. 134–5].

With these now famous words, India’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, began his speech celebrating India’s moment of independence. Delivered just before midnight on 14–15 August 1947, the speech actually served as the preamble to a motion he introduced to the Constituent Assembly, asking his fellow legislators to take a pledge of dedication to ‘the service of India’ (CA, 14 August 1947) [Doc. 1, pp. 134–5]. The Constituent Assembly was a governing council, elected just a year before in 1946 and at this time functioned both as a provisional parliament and as a deliberative body to write India’s Constitution.

As Nehru intoned that ‘a moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old and into the new,’ he stood in the Council Hall, the central chamber of a grand round building designed by Herbert Baker in 1921 to house a colonial legislature for India. This legislature was created by reforms implemented in the Government of India Act of 1919 that signalled the beginning of power sharing between Indians and the British. The building, indeed, signified the old and the new, as Indian representatives, wearing the nationalist uniform – a long white cotton shirt and pants (kurta pajama) or a formal wrapped cloth (dhoti) for men and a sari for women – carried out the business of the Assembly. The scene was formal, with the air of a normal legislative day, a few aides walking through the aisles.

The text of the speech set out three critical elements that shaped Nehru’s vision of the world. First, he showed remorse for Partition, the fact that at the moment of independence British India was divided into two states – India and Pakistan. In fact, when he said that the pledge of freedom was not redeemed in ‘full measure,’ he referred not only to the fact of Partition, but also to the horrific violence that surrounded it. Second, he was eager to put Partition behind and move on to the task of nation building, creating a just and equitable society. As he put it, the goal of society was to end ‘poverty and ignorance and disease and inequality of opportunity.’ And finally, he already saw India as a major world power engaged in the events of foreign policy and part of the mission to ensure ‘world peace and the welfare of mankind.’

This chapter, therefore, examines various elements of the promises of independence that embodied that moment. A political optimism was reflected in the dynamic velocity with which democratic institutions were created and developed, e.g., the Constitution, elections, and land reform. And it was also reflected in how India faced challenges to the new nation, such as resettlement of refugees and war with Pakistan.

There was a powerful duality that characterized the first few years of independence – freedom and also violence, deliberations about fundamental rights and also mobilization for war, celebration and mourning. Two contrasting images of 1947 signify the complexity of that moment. On the one hand, the Constituent Assembly engaged in intensive and exhilarating debates about good government that led to India’s democratic Constitution. On the other hand, the Partition of India and birth of Pakistan yielded tragic and convulsive violence, which accompanied the transfer of populations to and from Pakistan and determined the indeterminable status of Kashmir.

While it took a long time for historians to be able to discuss Partition, i.e., to be able to step back and analyze it, there is now a growing rich body of scholarship about it. For the Constituent Assembly, however, Partition was implicit and explicit in much of its discussion. And historians have treated the Constituent Assembly differently – it has received little attention, assumed to be part of the continuity with the late colonial period. Therefore, although this chapter focuses on both Partition and the Constituent Assembly, it deals with them differently.

The story of Partition presented here has to acknowledge the nuances in the evolving scholarly debates on the subject, as an equal partner to the events of Partition itself. This is certainly one of the few subjects of postindependence history that provides such an opportunity to see the disagreements and variations among so many historians.

CONCURRENCES – PARTITION AND THE CONSTITUENT ASSEMBLY

There are many dates we could use as a starting point to talk about the decision for India’s independence on 15 August 1947. It was the culmination of India’s grassroots-organized freedom movement and the goal of nationalist leaders, most famously Mohandas K. Gandhi. And surely it was inevitable, long before 1947. While that story is not part of this text, it is critical to bear in mind that India’s independence was hard-fought. While Nehru gave his statesman’s speech to the Constituent Assembly, all over India there were celebrations and mass-gatherings to acknowledge this long awaited moment, and many of the ceremonies on Independence Day commemorated the martyrs of that struggle as well. For example, on this occasion in Patna, the capital of the state of Bihar and a central site of politics of the Freedom Movement, the Governor laid the foundation stone for a monument to seven student protestors killed by police during the Quit India uprising of 1942.

In this way Independence Day was a commemoration, a celebration, and an acknowledgement of a grave and consequential political compromise in the form of the creation of two states – India and Pakistan. It is impossible to separate the history of independence from the history of Partition, which resonates in both India and Pakistan as the manifestation of communal conflict, i.e., a permanent marker of the potential animosity between Hindus and Muslims. Partition symbolizes the momentary triumph of the argument put forth by Mohammad Ali Jinnah that a government in a Hindu-majority nation could not protect the rights of a Muslim minority.

Like so many other stories, the history of Partition has many precursors in the politics of Hindu and Muslim and secular nationalism in India. The Muslim League as an organization that articulated the rights of Muslims was founded in 1906. But the demand for a separate Muslim state did not gain substantial traction until after 1942 and the full contours of the two separate nations were not clear until just before independence itself. To untangle some of this story, let us begin with most narrow construction of the events that immediately led up to independence and the form it would take.

Why 14/15 August 1947?

The date of Indian independence – or the transfer of power, as British histories record it – was selected by the British. Many dates had more resonance to Indian nationalism. In fact, in 1930, the Indian National Congress declared 26 January Independence Day, and continued to hold rallies and meetings to honour that day for years afterward. In 1950 the government officially declared 26 January Republic Day, a commemorative national holiday. Other days 2 August, the beginning of the ‘Quit India’ movement or 13 April, which marked a massacre of peaceful Indian protestors by British led troops, would have signified important moments in Indian nationalism.

Indian National Congress (INC): A major political party in modern India;...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Introduction to the series
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Publisher's acknowledgements
• Chronology
• Who's who
• Glossary
• Maps
• Part One Analysis
• Part Two Documents
• Further reading
• References
• Index