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Schwartzberg Atlas, v. , p. 223.

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from 1914 till the attainment of independence in 1947 and 1948. Among the most important of these was India's partici- pation in 1919 in the Versailles Peace Conference and its ad- mission as a full member of the League of Nations that same year. Thereby India gained a universally recognized interna- tional personality, notwithstanding the persistence of its co- lonial ties to the British Empire. In the interwar period the growing international labor and anticolonial movements, often under the same political aegis, found sympathy among many future leaders of India and helped mold their political philos- ophies. Other international involvements (e.g., the Khilafat movement of 1919, see text for plate VIII.C.2) tended to be short-lived and did not fit into any long-term patterns of po- litical behavior.

The Second World War found many Indian leaders less will- ing to respond to Britain's needs than were their counterparts a generation earlier. Among the reasons for the call within In- dia to disassociate the country from the British war effort were the perceived inadequacy of Britain's response to Indian aid rendered in the previous conflict, as evidenced by the slowness of the advance toward independence and the patent inconsist- ency of Britain's protesting that it was safeguarding world de- mocracy while denying democracy to India itself. But despite the noncooperation of Congress in the war effort, masses of Indians again swelled the armed forces of the empire, contrib- uting on a scale even greater than in World War I and, as may be seen on map (b), participating much more widely and ac- tively in combat. Again, the contribution from the Punjab sig- nificantly exceeded that from other parts of India; but the growth in the participation from other regions was relatively greater. A noteworthy symbolic difference in the Indian role in World War II from that in World War I was the active cooperation with the Axis of the Indian Independence League, under Subhas Chandra Bose, and of the Indian National Army (recruited from prisoners of war) which, advancing with the Japanese beyond Burma, abortively planted the flag of inde- pendence on Indian soil in May 1944.

Following the war India became a charter member of the United Nations. Even before its own independence was at- tained, its leadership called for the withdrawal of Indian troops from Allied armies of occupation in areas taken over from the Japanese and for the speedy granting of freedom to the still- colonial areas of Southeast and Southwest Asia. The distinctive character of its role on the world political stage had already largely been shaped.

Sources (in addition to those in the General Bibliography)3

Government Documents

Great Britain, British Information Services (1952), I and II;

Great Britain, Committee of Imperial Defense (1920–48), I.

Atlases and Maps

I. Richards et al. (1965, Atlas), I and II; E. Tschudi (n.d. [1965], Map); U.S. Military Academy . . . (1959, Atlas), I and II.

3 All works dated before 1940 relate to World War I, and all works after that date relate to World War II unless citation is fol- lowed by the following notations: I, for World War I; I and II, for both world wars; C, for works referred to for Chronology; II and C, for World War II and Chronology.

Other Works

G. C. Ahluwalia (1949); A. Ali (1922); S. P. Baranwai (1969, 1970); A. J. Barker (1967); A. Bharati (1961); A. C. Chat- terji (1947); E. Dane (1917); S. T. Das (1969); J. G. Elliot (1965); Facts on File (various years); D. Forbes (1964), I and II; K. K. Ghosh (1969); W. G. Hingston (1943), (1944), (1946); P. D. Kaushik (1964), C; L. J. Kavic (1967); M. S. Leigh (1922); G. Matthews (1966); J. W. B. Merewether and F. Smith (1919); Bimla Prasad (1962), C; Bisheshwar Prasad (1956–66); N. V. Rajkumar (1952), C; Royal Institute of In- ternational Affairs (1947, listed under General References); Rajendra Singh (1963), I and II; L. Sundaram (1944), C.

VIII.C.7. Monuments of the Imperial Period

The rich material legacy of British rule in India is suggested by the monuments depicted on plate VIII.C.7. In palaces, churches, universities, railway stations, cantonments, post of- fices, dak bungalows, dams, and a host of other publicly spon- sored works the British gave vent to their creative genius and expressed their sense of imperial grandeur. Their architectural and engineering achievements were reflected in privately spon- sored undertakings by Indians during the Raj itself and con- tinue to be influential in imparting spirit and substance to pub- lic and private creations of the era of independence.

Photo Credits

(a), (h), and (i)—courtesy of Indian Ministry of Infor- mation and Broadcasting; (b) and (c)—courtesy of the Ames Library of South Asia, University of Minnesota; (d)—photo by Elie Charlier, courtesy of the Ames Library; (e), (f), and (g) from J. H. Furneaux (n.d. [1895], pp. 186, 212, and 273 resp.).

VIII.D. THE INDIAN EMPIRE IN 1947

VIII.D.1. Indian Empire: Administrative Divisions, 1947, with Community of Rulers of Indian States and Areas of Majority of Principal Communities

Three factors inherent in the map of India at the close of British rule were to play essential roles in determining the ter- ritorial divisions and conflicts of the ensuing period: (a) the arbitrary and bewilderingly complex political division of the country into governor's and chief commissioner's provinces and more than six hundred princely states; (b) the distribution of religious communities; and (c) the religion of the rulers of the princely states. All three of these factors are portrayed on plate VIII.D.1, map (a). A simpler overview of the major ad- ministrative divisions, that is, the provinces, the major princely states, and the state agencies, is provided in map (b). The two insets to map (a) provide a more detailed view of the two areas of communally heterogeneous population that were most keenly disputed by the leaders of the soon-to-be states of India and Pakistan and were the scenes of the most traumatic events attending partition and stemming from it.

The broad correspondence of the areas that were to become Pakistan and India with the regions of Muslim and non-Muslim majorities is, of course, immediately apparent. Also apparent is the fact that that correspondence was far from perfect. A brief rundown of the deviations from complete adherence to the communal principal in establishing Pakistan's borders is in or- der here. In following it the reader may wish to refer to plate XIII.C.1, which provides the names of districts as they existed in 1947. In Punjab, Bengal, and Assam, all of which were to be partitioned, the 1947 Radcliffe awards assigned to India certain small areas with a slight predominance of Muslims in the population. (These included, as the insets to map (a) re- veal, parts of Lahore, Amritsar, and Gurdaspur Districts in Punjab; parts of Jessore, Nadia, Murshidabad, and Dinajpur Districts in Bengal; and part of Sylhet District in Assam. Addi- tionally, a single strategically located Muslim-majority sub- division of Purnea District in the province of Bihar was as- signed to India because partition of Bihar was never demanded or contemplated. (Since this tract of land reached from the future East Pakistani borders to those of Nepal, awarding it to Pakistan would have completely severed the non-Muslim ma- jority areas of northeast India from the rest of the country.) While in the west no non-Muslim majority areas (i.e., at the district or tahsil level of analysis) were awarded to Pakistan, in the east it was given a number of areas in which there was a slight predominance of non-Muslims (Hindus, Christians, Buddhists, and adherants to tribal religions). These included portions of Khulna, Faridpur, Malda, and Dinajpur Districts in Bengal, a part of the Bengali-speaking Sylhet District of Assam, and the whole of the mainly tribal and Buddhist Chit- tagong Hill Tracts District of Bengal. The fact that some of these last-noted areas were completely surrounded by Muslim majority subdivisions underscores the virtual impossibility of arriving at a border between India and Pakistan that would appear, in the eyes of those most concerned, both just and workable.

Whatever defects the Radcliffe awards may have had, it seems likely that the leaders of both India and Pakistan could have resigned themselves to their new international boundaries so far as the areas of the former British provinces were con- cerned. But, under the terms by which the British had agreed to quit India, the princely states were vouchsafed their integ- rity, and their rulers had the right to decide on the future as- sociation with either India or Pakistan or neither. No thought, therefore, was officially given to partitioning any of those states along communal, or any other, lines. Although, with few ex- ceptions, the religion of the ruling princes accorded with that of the majority of their subjects, which simplified their ulti- mate decisions on accession, there were several noteworthy ex- ceptions: Hyderabad and Junagadh, states ruled by Muslim princes, in which the mass of the people were Hindus; and Jammu and Kashmir, where a Hindu maharaja ruled a pre- dominantly Muslim population. The former two states, which were not contiguous with Pakistan, were (as detailed in plate IX.D.1) eventually absorbed into India, though not without bloodshed; the latter, which adjoined both India and Paki- stan, was to prove a perennial bone of contention between the two. It is in this state that events subsequent to partition (treated especially in plate IX.C.2) were to result in the most glaring territorial discordance between South Asian political boundaries and the limits of areas with Muslim and non- Muslim majorities.

Sources

India, Census (1931), (1941); India, Memoranda on Indian states (1939, 1940); National Geographic Society (1946, listed under Maps).

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