Introduction



Research Aims:

The partition of the subcontinent was a major demographic transition and proved to be an overhaul of existing social structures. It was a manifestation of the widening of the cultural, religious and political chasms that existed between the different communities living within one territory. In this paper we account for the general overarching patterns of criminality that emerged from this process, and look into how they were dealt with during the Partition of 1947. We aim to move away from thinking of the partition merely as broad political negotiations and focus on the individual stories that lie behind them.



Originality/Importance

The partition of 1947 is generally conceived to be a heroic independence movement for both  nations; India and Pakistan, but in reality this ripping apart of one whole entailed highly negative repercussions for the masses. This paper's claim to originality lies in the fact that it sheds light on the rather neglected aspect of the movement - 'the victimization of the
people'.

The immense suffering and loss of human blood by completely obscene and unacceptable
crimes committed at the time has been overlooked due to the emphasis on the façade
constructed via various political ideologies and religious rhetoric. Michael Billig in his Banal
Nationalism writes about how these “ideologies” and “nationalisms” are created, reinforced
and thus lead to the suppression of all ideas in contradiction to it (Billig, 1995, 12). This results
in the creation of elevated and revered abstractions that inevitably cloak individual or
communal experiences. Furthermore, according to Pandey the major cause of this has been
the undue focus on the "ends", rather than the means of partitioning. These brutal "means"
have simply been forgotten. Our paper leans on this claim and moves away from abstractions
such as "freedom" and "independence" to tangible voices and stories. We hypothesize that
this forgetfulness has emerged from the communal need to forget the pains that the Partition

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caused, hence individuals and communities ended up "maintaining the silence” (Pandey, 2002, p 175).



Research Questions:

Considering the immense literature on violence and killing during the Partition, we have narrowed it down to formulate some key research questions which have guided us through our primary research and secondary research and helped us organize the data and draw some conclusions. We were interested in the different kinds of crimes committed during the Partition, including violence against women, improper rehabilitation of refugees and violated property rights. We were also concerned with the crime processes during this time of political unrest, mostly whether people were compensated fairly and what factors determined the crime processes. Finally, we looked at any anomalies in the behavior of people belonging to a particular creed or ethnicity. Our interviews and analysis aim to find out whether such behavior was even considered ‘unexpected’ at that point or not.





















































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Literature Review:

We carried out a literature review to observe what has already been stated and researched regarding the crimes that took place during partition. Also, we wanted to gauge what the literature covers in light of our research questions.

There is no dearth of literature on the forced displacements, mass migrations and unofficial exchanges of population that took place during Partition. Terms such as 'refugees', 'displaced' and even 'stateless persons' are littered across the realm of our research, posing questions of identity and reeling of immense material and emotional losses. Before delving into ideas put forward by writers of oral histories and researchers, the problem of defining such terms is almost always addressed. Hannah Arendt when discussing forced migration in Jewish history touches upon a concept deeply intertwined with the history of the 1947 Partition. She claims that labeling an individual 'stateless' elides any national rights that he would otherwise be guaranteed. Drawing from this concept Yasmin Khan in ‘The Great Partition’ talks about how the refugees were right at the centre of the “complex governmental business of teasing out two new states” (Khan, 2007, 10) and how it was this fluidity of boundaries that led both states‐in‐ creation to neglect these refugees, and led to a rise in criminality.

A phenomenon almost inextricably tied to mass migration and the creation of refugees has
been ethnic violence. As Ishtiaq Ahmed’s article “Forced Migration and Ethnic Cleansing in
Lahore in 1947” points out most migration/demographic transformations are caused because
people wanted to flee the violence inflicted on them in their respective areas. This compels us
to distinguish between ordinary migration and politically imposed migration. According to him,
the latter kind emerges when existing structures of authority and order cease to function
efficiently or become blatantly unreliable and biased, thus leaning towards casting the refugees
as victims of duress.

On the other hand, there are others that also see them as ‘agents of violence’. Two of the
most popular oral histories corroborating this are Urvashi Butalias and Ritu Menon’s books.
Though undoubtedly suffering, these refugees were driven to brutal criminal acts against

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authorities, other ethnicities etc. This leads us into the controversial subject of subjective criminalities; during the partition the criminal of one community was the hero of another.

Muzammil Quraishi in his book 'Muslims and Crime: A Comparative Study' notes how colonial
practices involved the manipulation of identities of the inhabitants of India as to embody
certain ethnicities as being ‘criminal’ and ‘deviant’. He explores the intentions of the British
coming into the sub‐continent with their ‘colonial plans’, the covering strategies of the British
for the actualizing of these plans and their consequences (Quraishi, 2005, 48). Such practices
followed by the British included the passing of The Criminal Tribes Act in 1871. The Eurocentric
practices of the British from the colonial times still have lasting repercussions on the criminal/
deviant identities set in place current day, fissures such as Muslim sectarian violence and
Islamophobia can be credited to this labeling process of the British. The practices of the
Muslims were tweaked as to create disparity between the different religions living in the sub‐
continent; conforming to the British strategy of divide and rule. As Alok Bhalla states in
‘Memories, History and Fictional Representations of the Partition’, it is never claimed that
there was no tension between the different ethnicities living in the sub‐continent before the
partition; there were situations that would lead to murder and arson. ‘But they also record that
such moments of communal nastiness were rare and transient’ (Bhalla, 1999, 3120) unlike the
violent crime that took place at the time of Partition. The British were able to distort the society
as such that different communities were no longer able to tolerate each other.



A glaring example of this palpable intolerance is found in the famous Sikh writer and historian

Khushwant Singh’s article ‘Last Days in Lahore: From the brittle security of an elite rooftop, a view of a city burning’’. He observes:

“That June afternoon of 1947 remains etched in my mind. I had returned from the high court
when I heard the uproar. I ran up to the roof of my apartment. The sun burnt down fiercely
over the city. From the centre billowed out a huge cloud of dense, black smoke. I did not have
to make guesses; the Hindu‐Sikh mohalla of Shahalmi was going up in flames. Muslim goondas







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had broken the back of non‐Muslim resistance. After Shahalmi, the fight went off out of the Hindus and Sikhs of Lahore.” (Singh cited in Ahmed, 2004, 8)

Another major aspect that we came across was the issues that women faced during the unrest. Menon and Bhasin report that 20,728 Muslim women and 9032 Hindu and Sikh women were repatriated after Partition (Menon and Bhasin, 1998 in Lester, D, 2010:4). Other case studies and our interviewees shed light on other issues such as rape, torture, mutilation, mass killings and voluntary suicides. The bulk of our information in this aspect came from Butalia's 'The Other Side of Silence', which goes through concepts of honor and its entailing bloodshed via the eyes of survivors or eyewitnesses.

According to Farrukh Khan's research introduction: "Women’s narratives add a new dimension to the hitherto ‘layer’ of someone else describing their experiences. These narratives…talk about their loss, how their ‘private’ domesticity was suddenly shattered by the events taking place in ‘public’ where they exercised little or no influence."

Most of the literature on women's issues includes the clear dichotomy between 'our' and their 'other' women. Pain was inflicted on women of other communities as a mode of punishment and a way to take revenge from another community, making their suffering into a perverted mode of crime control.

Other than this, agents of crime control played a very minimum and insignificant role. It is
noted that a huge number of Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs and individuals from other communities
were either “perpetrators or victims” of horrendous crimes of “murder, mayhem, torture and
rape” (Greenberg, 2005, 96). However, neither Pakistan nor India made the effort of

establishing tribunals where the guilty could be tried and justice could be offered to the victims
of these crimes. Moreover, there were no court cases “in which a theatrical space could have
been created for the acknowledgment of the suffering imposed” (Das, 1995 cited in Greenberg,
2005, 96).