Marxism – Borderless

By Farouk Gulsara

When the word ‘Partition’ is mentioned, it is always assumed to refer to the 1947 Partition of India and Pakistan. In fact, the Partition of the British Raj occurred five times.

Not so long ago, as recently as 1928, a vast expanse of land from Aden in the West to Rangoon in the east was united as the Indian Empire, all under British rule. It was the zenith of the British Empire, and it seemed the sun would never set on the Empire. A quarter of the world’s population lived here, from the Red Sea to Southeast Asia, and they all used the Indian rupee. One would travel across the span with an Indian passport. By 1971, in just 40 years, this Empire had been shattered five times, resulting in 12 nation-states.

We should learn to tell stories by listening to how housewives gossip. They narrate intimate personal stories about their neighbours, with vivid detail, as if they were there in the target’s bedroom. It becomes more believable when real characters are added. The same advice applies to telling history, his-story. Sam Dalrymple’s Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia does exactly that. A dry subject like history is turned into an unputdownable book by giving human faces to the people making difficult decisions at the administrative level and to those who have to bear the brunt of those decisions. Perhaps the author’s filmmaking background pushed him towards this style. That makes it very engaging.

The author, Samuel Hew Tantallon Darymple, is a scholar of Sanskrit and Persian, as well as a historian, author, activist, and social media influencer. He co-founded Project Dastaan[1], a peace-building initiative that uses digital technology to reconnect people displaced by the 1947 Partition of India with their childhood communities and villages.

The five Partitions mentioned in this book are: the separation of Burma from India in 1937; the reclassification of Aden as a British protectorate; the formation of Pakistan; the dissolution of the 550-odd princely states; and, finally, a bloody civil war that led to the formation of Bangladesh.

The Indian idea of ‘Bharat’ is traditionally shaped by the ancient Hindu geography of Bharatvarsha, a triangular landmass stretching from the Himalayas in the north to the Indian Ocean in the south. Notably, Afghanistan, mentioned in the Mahabharata, and Burma, known as Brahmadesh (Land of Brahma), do not fall within this framework. The city of Kandahar in Afghanistan is apparently named after Gandhari, the blindfolded matriarch of the Kaurava clan.

After the 1905 Partition of Bengal and the 1919 Jallianwala Bagh massacre, calls for self-governance grew louder. To pacify the Indian public, the Crown sent a group of seven, known as the Simon Commission[2], in 1928 to implement constitutional reforms. It did nothing to advance Indian independence but demarcated Burma as a territory quite separate from British India, and its inclusion in India was an error.

Coincidentally, this was the aftermath of the 1928 Depression. Before this, Burma was a melting pot of cultures. Its capital, Rangoon, one of the busiest commercial cities in Asia, was labelled the ‘Paris of the East’. It is said that in 1920, there were more traders in Burma than in New York. Rangoon port was an important harbour for the export of rice, teak and petroleum. Its banking services drew people from many regions. It was a multilingual and multicultural city, shaped by large-scale migration. People were heard speaking Bengali, Gujarati, Tamil, Marwari, Urdu, Chinese, English, and other languages.

The turn of the economic tide and the disparity in economic status between the ethnic Burmese and the sojourners sparked a series of unrest. The Chettiars and Bengali houses and shops were targeted. Indians were systematically excluded from Burma, forcing rich traders to become refugees and make a beeline for India. This long march over the Patkai hills to India became a feature again as Japanese soldiers (and the Indian National Army under Bose) advanced during World War 2. The experiences of Mariappan, a Tamil shopkeeper who fled to Tamil Nadu to start anew in Burma because of his lowly caste, and had to run again because of Burmese nationalism, are heart-wrenching. Then there is Uttam Singh, who had to endure a treacherous long march home to Punjab across the hills. Losing everything, it was a miracle that he and his family made it in one piece. Little snippets like these are the real reasons this book grows on readers.

Caught in the middle are the Naga people, whose land lies precariously between Burma and India. Although its leaders rallied for an independent Naga state, a fifth of the region fell under Burmese control. For decades to come, insurgency remained an issue. On April 1st 1937, Burma was carved out of British India, leaving many unanswered questions and triggering years of attempts to usurp power within Burma, followed by years of military rule and turmoil.

After its capture by the British East India Company, Aden was governed as part of the Bombay Presidency. It was an important coal station for ships. The administrators regarded Arabs as fundamentally different from Indians. To increase efficiency, the British decided in 1937 to rule the port of Aden as a British colony and its hinterland as a protectorate, much to the dismay of many in the Indian community there. The rise of Arab nationalism that followed, with the emergence of dynamic leaders such as Gamal Nasser of Egypt, who promoted Arab patriotism, meant the former Arabian Raj kingdom would no longer be associated with Indians. Indians, once regarded as cultured and civilised, were soon viewed as competitors. By the late 1950s, a reverse exodus began. Indians with deep roots in these Arab lands, including property, businesses, and connections, had to flee helter-skelter back to India and the UK. The Ambanis were one such family affected by this.

Although Jinnah initially joined the Indian National Congress, his affiliation with the Muslim League grew stronger as he felt that Gandhi was leading the party and the nation towards a more Hindu-centric direction. The way the Congress conducted its meetings was as if they were at a religious ceremony, with chanting of mantras and singing of religious hymns. Muslims began to question how they would be treated in an independent India with Congress at the helm of power. Even though Jinnah appeared as an icon of Hindu-Muslim unity, later events propelled him and other Muslims to push for a two-state solution for post-independent India.

In a way, as Gandhi promoted his Hindu agenda, the Burmese, with their Buddhist practice, also increasingly felt more detached from India, further fuelling Burmese nationalism.

The post-WW2 era saw many changes in India. Britain was in debt, and the push for independence and a separate nation for Muslims was in full force. The third Partition was about to take place, but it was preceded by mindless killings and violence in the areas destined to be part of Pakistan. The Bengal region witnessed brutality on Direct Action Day, led by Suhrawardy and his acolyte, Mujibur Rahman, who would later be instrumental in the formation of Bangladesh. Things were no better in Punjab. The confusion created by Radcliffe’s arbitrary carving of the country left people unsure which country they belonged to, even one month after the ‘tryst with destiny’ speech.

There was then a scramble to recruit the 550-plus princely states to join Pakistan or India, or to stand alone. This was the 4th Partition. Recruitment reached feverish heights in states such as Junagadh, Kashmir, and Hyderabad. Junagadh housed two sacred Hindu sites, Dwarka and Somnath, but was ruled by a Muslim Nawab. Kashmir had a Hindu king, but his subjects were predominantly Muslims. The situation was reversed in Hyderabad.

The shattered subcontinent of India has been in constant flux even after attaining self-rule. It has to deal with internal squabbles and hostile neighbours. The situation becomes complicated as the world divides itself into the blue corner of capitalism and the red corner of communism. Marxism and Maoist ideology spread across its states, creating skirmishes here and there.

Pakistan, too, had its own problems. The insistence on using Urdu as the national language was not taken lightly by the Bengali-speaking East Pakistanis. The discord reached a tipping point in 1971, when the Bengali Awami League won the Pakistani elections. Civil war broke out when West Pakistani leaders refused to accept the election results. India sent in its troops to squash West Pakistan’s army and effectively completed the Fifth Partition, the creation of the country of Bangladesh.

The recurring theme throughout the book is that people continue to help one another, regardless of the day’s political climate. Despite ideological differences, people help people. The book highlights numerous heart-stirring accounts of the extraordinary resilience and compassion of everyday people. These ‘unity in diversity’ stories emerge from small acts of kindness that transcend religious, social, and economic boundaries.

It remains to be debated by future historians whether the colonial masters can be blamed for shattering the land that spanned the Arabian Gulf to Southeast Asia. Given the insatiable appetite of human greed for land, wealth and power, are these sequelae inevitable anyway?

[1] https://samdalrymple.com/project-dastaan

[2] https://www.britannica.com/topic/Simon-Commission

Farouk Gulsara is a daytime healer and a writer by night. After developing his left side of his brain almost half his lifetime, this johnny-come-lately decided to stimulate the non-dominant part of his remaining half. An author of two non-fiction books, Inside the twisted mind of Rifle Range Boy and Real Lessons from Reel Life, he writes regularly in his blog, Rifle Range Boy.

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The Tree Within: Octavio Paz in India

Book Review by Somdatta Mandal

Title: The Tree Within: The Mexican Nobel Laureate Octavio Paz’s Years in India

Author: Indranil Chakravarty

Publisher: Penguin Random House India

‘For me, India was an accident.’ – Octavio Paz

The Mexican Nobel laureate poet and essayist Octavio Paz (1914-1998) was a writer of lightening insights and electric intelligence. His impassioned poetry is meditative, with a precision of language that is imbued with a strangely sensuous quality. In fact, language and poetry per se were some of his key thematic concerns. The announcement on the cover of this book states that The Tree Within is the enchanting story of Octavio Paz’s passionate love-affair with India where he served as Mexico’s ambassador in the 1960s but reading through this very detailed 518 pages well-researched biography of the Nobel Laureate poet one realises that it is a lot more.

Immersing himself in India’s rich cultural life and contemplative traditions, Paz travelled widely, forged deep friendships with some of India’s finest minds, and produced several of his most inspired poetry and essays. It was here that he met the love of his life and until the day he died, he continued to refer to India as the place where he experienced what he called his ‘second birth’. It is difficult to find similar cases in our history when a major creative figure from abroad drew inspiration from India’s culture for one’s own works over such an extended period. His writings became a bridge between continents, blending Eastern and Western sensibilities in ways that enriched the literary landscapes of both. In India, where the erotic and the sacred blend in ecstatic union – unlike in the West, where the two are scrupulously kept apart – he saw the possibility of a new synthesis through the dissolution of dualities. Interestingly, Mexico belongs to the western hemisphere but is generally considered non-West, like India. Blending biography, cultural history, and literary criticism, The Tree Within is a luminous testament to the enduring alchemy between India and the world through one of the greatest writers of the 20^th century.

The book is divided into ten stand-alone chapters, and one can move to the topic of one’s choice. The first two chapters entitled ‘Family and Nation’ (1914-36) and ‘Paz Before India’ (1936-1951) serve as the background of Paz’s lineage, his growing up, and his passionate engagement with India can be understood in terms of the seeds planted early in his life through his family as well as the national cultural ambience where the idea of India was inscribed. All of them played a role in reinforcing his attraction towards the country. Unlike T.S.Eliot, Paz became politically active from an early age, with an initial inclination towards anarchism and Marxism and a subsequent rejection of Communism. He witnessed the Spanish Civil War firsthand, and he also had a close relationship with the surrealists in France.

It is only in the third chapter, ‘The First Sojourn’ (1951-52), that India is physically present when in 1951 Paz, then 37-years old, was assigned the task of opening a new embassy in New Delhi. It recounts his long sea-journey to India and his experiences and poetic output during that brief period of six months. To some extent, he externalised his inner unhappiness on India during his first trip. India of that time had little to offer him by way of intellectual excitement or fulfilling companionship. Things were in disarray when under Nehru as the new nation-state had just been born a few years ago. In New Delhi, Paz stayed at the Imperial Hotel, which became his residence during his entire stay. He also carried a lot of baggage in terms of Western cultural prejudices towards India. India not only smothered his senses; the grinding poverty and rigid mores of life left him disgusted.

In Chapter Four, ‘Paz and Satish Gujral: In Light of Mexico’ describes the personal friendship between Paz and Satish Gujral, one of India’s leading painters and how Paz shaped his development as an artist by inserting Gujral among the maestros of the Mexican mural movement. In fact, the influence of the Mexican mural movement on modern Indian art through Gujral would not have been possible without Octavio Paz’s decision to send him to Mexico. The meeting with Nehru and Indira Gandhi through Satish’s brother I.K. Gujral also offers interesting information. The following chapter, ‘Coming Home, Going Away’ (1953 -62) traces Paz’s life and creative evolution from the time he left India to the time he was sent to India as Mexico’s ambassador in 1962. This ten-year period between his first sojourn in India in 1952 and his return as the Mexican ambassador in 1962 involved many defining moments in his personal and professional life which shaped his creative evolution as a writer. The extent to which he had already immersed himself in Indian philosophy is evident from the ways he assimilated his experiences and insights of his first stay in the writings of the next decade even when their themes had little to do with India.

‘Making Poetry, Making Love’ (1962 -68) is an account of Paz’s travels through the Indian subcontinent (he was given additional charge of Pakistan, Afghanistan, Nepal and Ceylon), his relationship with Bona Tibertelli with whom he spent an idyllic vacation across the Indian subcontinent, his unhappy marriage with Elena Garro, his meeting and eventual marriage with his second wife, Marie-Jose Tramini, and the poetry that grew out of that amorous experience – all find ample space in this chapter. The way in which their love affair unfolded is wrapped in secrecy. It is also said that he developed some unsavoury practices for a man of his position. Nevertheless, it was the most bountiful period of an unimaginably productive life.

Chapter Seven named, ‘The Poet as Diplomat (962-68), recounts his role as a diplomat and his pioneering bridge-building efforts. His life stands as a shining example of how the advantages of diplomatic life can be used for maximizing literary output. The title of the next chapter ‘Paz’s Indian Friends: Surrounded by Infinity’ is self-explanatory. It recounts Paz’s close personal friendships with major Indian painters, musicians, writers and thinkers. We are given details of the close relationship with Indira Gandhi, and Paz throws interesting light on Indira by contrasting her with Nehru: “Indira was concrete and sober. She never forgot the old maxim that politics was the art of the possible…”

Among the literary figures, mention is made of Santha Rama Rau, Nirad C. Chaudhuri, Mulk Raj Anand, Raja Rao, Satchidananda H. Vatsyayan, and many others. The story of Paz’s dramatic resignation in October 1968 over his own government’s massacre of students at the Plaza de Tlateloco is explained by the author through studying archival documents. The next chapter ‘Under Western Eyes: Visiting Writers and Artists’ tells the story of famous international writers, musicians and painters who met Paz in India and forged lifelong bonds and collaborations based on their common love for India.

The final chapter ‘Paz After India’ (1968 -98), traces the continued presence of India-related themes in Paz’s body of work, particularly his prose, ever since his departure from the country. Leaving India was not easy for Paz and Marie-Jose. Over the next three years, he would drift around the world, accepting fellowships, residencies and lecture assignments. Though Indian themes gradually faded out of his poetry, in prose it continued to engage him till his last days, thirty years after leaving India. Even in old age, Paz continued to maintain epistolary contact with his Indian friends and welcomed distinguished Indian visitors to Mexico with his characteristic Latin American warmth. ‘Cantata’ tells the knotty story of Paz’s legacy in Mexico and how India has periodically remembered him, one as late as February 2023, at a large international conference held in IIC[1], New Delhi, on the cultural links between India and Latin America. There was unanimity in the acknowledgement that the Mexican poet had created a permanent, direct bridge between India and Latin America that no state-led enterprise could have done.

Before concluding, a few words need to be said about the author of this book. An academic and a filmmaker by profession, Indranil Chakravarty’s interest in Hispanic literature and culture comes out clearly through the translations he made of Paz’s poems. His enormous labour to bring out this volume comes out in the manner he reconstructs the inner journey of the poet by delving into multilingual archives, declassified diplomatic files, personal letters, and intimate interviews. The labour that has gone into selecting the innumerable photographs that don almost every page of the book, many borrowed from the website zonaoctaviopaz.com (an ongoing repository of photographic and news material on Paz put together by a group of Mexican scholars) clearly exemplifies the author’s emphasis on visual imagery too. In Acknowledgements, he clearly mentions that he has merely tried to fill up the missing information on the poet’s India-years. He entirely agrees with Ramchandra Guha’s contention that an autobiography or memoir must be understood as a pre-emptive strike against a future biographer. The poet’s memoir of India elides most of the aspects that are interesting to us today.

[1] India International Centre

Somdatta Mandal, critic and translator, is a former Professor of English at Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan, India.

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