The past is a foreign country,’ LP Hartley famously wrote. Josy Joseph’s latest book, Birth of a Nation: The Twenty-One Days that Made India, reminds us that, in 1947, India came perilously close to becoming several foreign countries.
Imagine boarding a train in New Delhi bound for Chennai. Before reaching your destination, you are stopped repeatedly at international borders to have your passport stamped, baggage cleared by Customs, and currency exchanged. Today, the idea sounds absurd. Yet, for a brief moment in 1947, it was a genuine political possibility. It is this forgotten moment, when India’s future was still far from settled, that Joseph reconstructs in Birth of a Nation.
Joseph traces the origins of this book to the discovery of the thousands of files lying uncatalogued in the National Archives, relating to ‘one of history’s most crowded periods.’ While popular accounts focus on Partition, Birth of a Nation tells us that another battle, less blood-spattered but no less significant, was being fought to prevent the Balkanisation of India.
The transfer of power did not simply divide the subcontinent into India and Pakistan. It also freed 565 princely states from British paramountcy, leaving it to their rulers to decide their future. These states covered 40 per cent of the subcontinent’s landmass and were home to nearly a quarter of its people. The rulers’ decisions would determine not merely the map of India, but whether there would be a united India at all. The responsibility for ensuring that there would be, was placed on the newly created ‘States Department’ in Delhi. The book focusses on the activities of the civil servants who formed this department and the events that occurred in the three weeks preceding August 15.
Negotiations between Delhi and the princely states were convoluted. While many rulers were reluctant to accede to the Indian Union, they were uncertain about what should replace British paramountcy. Some hoped for a Third Dominion, “neither India nor Pakistan but a sovereign order of princes.” The most populated states, Hyderabad, Travancore, Kashmir, Gwalior, Jaipur, Baroda, and Jodhpur, “had been nursing dreams of an independent future for themselves.”
Joseph writes: “Jinnah offered Jodhpur the use of Karachi as a free port, free import of arms, jurisdiction over the Jodhpur-Hyderabad (Sindh) railway and a supply of grain for the famine-threatened districts in the Maharaja’s domain. In return, said Jinnah, Jodhpur should declare its independence on 15 August and then join Pakistan.” This suggests that the Muslim League saw the princely states as an opportunity to reshape the balance of power in the subcontinent well before the issue of Kashmir became a flashpoint. Ironically, its ideological adversary, the Hindu Mahasabha, driven by its own vision of Akhand Bharat, and opposition to the Congress, sometimes took positions that encouraged the princely states to resist accession. Muddying the waters further were a number of British officials who had developed cosy relations with the princely states. Indore, for instance, had a British Prime Minister.
Thus, for the States Department, every negotiation with a princely state posed a separate challenge. Under the aegis of Sardar Patel and his secretary, VP Menon, “A small group of Indian officials gathered in New Delhi for the critical mission of completing the jigsaw puzzle of India. They were tasked with accomplishing in weeks what usually takes decades, if not centuries—nothing less than the creation of an independent nation.” These were the men who built the republic. The book elaborates on the work of a few—Aravamudu Iyengar, CC Desai, NM Buch, MK Vellodi, Akbar Hydari—but also suggests that there were many more.
The use of archival sources lends credibility to the stories, many of which will be unfamiliar to readers today. However, the extensive documentary detail occasionally interrupts the narrative flow, and the historical context is not always sufficiently developed.
Despite these minor flaws, Birth of a Nation reminds us that the making of modern India was a difficult endeavour, made possible not only by visionary leaders, but also by the dedicated civil servants who worked behind the scenes.