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in which they would salute the tricolour flag of the Indian union as the viceroy took up his new role of Governor General. But the Indian crowd surged into the specially prepared arena and threw the display into turmoil. Alston noted correctly that this represented a fine, and indeed final, example of the Indians’ ‘Marx Brothers-like’ ability to subvert British pomposity.25 It was perhaps the only moment of real comedy in a tragic summer. As tens of thousands more were hacked or burned to death in communal killings, Nehru rebuffed Pethick-Lawrence’s breezy congratulations on India’s independence: ‘There is little to feel happy about in India… now. We have had a hard time and the forces of evil have surrounded us.’26 For the next three or four years Nehru was plagued with doubts about whether India would survive at all.

THE CRESCENT FRAGMENTS: BENGAL DIVIDED

In the Punjab the riots and killing that continued through the months before and after partition were marked by military precision and unbelievable sadism: in some cases whole train loads of innocents were burned alive or disembowelled. The British boundary force policing the division ordained by Sir Cyril Radcliffe’s commission was too small and ineffective to make much difference. The pattern was different to the east in Bengal and Assam. The region had its share of brutal communal killings and fear had been ever present since the Calcutta and Noakhali riots of 1946, but the dismemberment of Bengal took much longer and was less dramatic than the events in the Punjab. Between mid 1946 and 1955 7–8 million people moved from east to west or vice versa. Many of these became refugees in the squalid shanty-town bustees of Calcutta, Dacca and other cities, putting a terrible strain on the fragile economies of the emerging dominions. These movements were like regular tidal flows rather than the abnormal waves of brutalized humanity in the west. The political repercussions were also complex. Quite apart from the simmering tension on the borders of West Bengal and East Pakistan, the peoples of northeastern India, members of recently armed and self-aware minorities such as the Nagas, Lushai and Chin, sought autonomy and looked with suspicion on the new nation-states. Local politicians agonized over the fate of what had come to be called India’s ‘Mongolian fringe’.27 Hindu politicians in Assam felt they had a ‘refugee problem’ as poor Muslim squatters from eastern Bengal grew in numbers, allegedly enticed into the province by the local Muslim League to bolster its case for Assam to be incorporated into East Pakistan.28 Burmese Arakan suffered not only separatist and communist movements, but also the attempts of Muslim parties to annex their populations to East Pakistan. Nowhere down the length of the crescent did relinquished or devolved British authority pass quietly into the hands of homogeneous nation-states. The divisions of colonial politics were to scarify the region for two generations.

In Bengal people came only slowly to understand the imminence of partition and even after the event most could not believe that their homeland had been irrevocably sundered into a crazy geographer’s nightmare, preferring instead to believe that their Hindu or Muslim leaders would see their error and help to unite the region again. This was not entirely fanciful. In May 1947 two very different leaders had come forward to try to preserve the province’s unity. Sarat Bose had always been a Bengal patriot as much as an Indian nationalist. As a young man, he had applauded the great and ultimately successful movement to reverse Lord Curzon’s partition of the province into Hindu-dominated and Muslim-dominated regions. He continued to believe that partition was an imperialist ploy and promulgated a plan for a united, autonomous Socialist Republic of Bengal. Exactly what this entity’s relationship was to be with the Union of India or the putative Pakistan remained unclear. But in Bose’s view this was to be decided by the popular democractic assembly that would be elected after independence.