Major Events Pre-1950

Tapas Sen was born in Kolkata (1934), and brought up in what now constitutes Bangladesh. He migrated to India in 1948, and joined the National Defence Academy in January 1950. He was commissioned as a fighter pilot into the Indian Air Force on 1 April 1953, from where he retired in 1986 in the rank of an Air Commodore. He now leads an active life, travelling widely and writing occasionally.

Editor's note: This article originally appeared on Air Commodore Sen's blog TKS' Tales. It is reproduced here with the author's permission. This is Part 2. Please read Part 1 first.

September 1947 - changes in the environment

As the days went by there were subtle changes in the environment that could be felt, though not fully defined. One was an erosion of identity. Slowly, all the Hindu government servants were transferred out. Most of them went off to ‘India'! The officers in the administration, judiciary and police became new faces, and most of them were not even Bengali speaking.

Tapas Sen was born in Kolkata (1934), and brought up in what now constitutes Bangladesh. He migrated to India in 1948, and joined the National Defence Academy in January 1950. He was commissioned as a fighter pilot into the Indian Air Force on 1 April 1953, from where he retired in 1986 in the rank of an Air Commodore. He now leads an active life, travelling widely and writing occasionally.

Editor's note: This article originally appeared on Air Commodore Sen's blog TKS' Tales. It is reproduced here with the author's permission. This is Part 1. Part 2 is available here.

My family

India saw tremendous political ferment in the in the late 1910s. The disappointment over the Montague-Chelmsford reforms of 1918 resulting in the diarchic Government of India Act of 1919 was converted to horror and anger by the passage of the Rowlatt Act, and the massacre at Jalianwalla Bagh on 13 April 1919.

A new form of protest - Satyagraha - was being tried out in India by Mahatma Gandhi. He channelled the fuming mass anger into the first massive truly national movement of non-cooperation. Many government servants left their jobs, and many students left their schools and colleges, as these were labelled as slave making factories.

Shenoi, a civil engineer and MBA, rose to the rank of Deputy Director-General of Works in the Indian Defence Service of Engineers. He has also been a member of HUDCO’s advisory board and of the planning team for Navi Mumbai. After retirement he has been helping NGOs in employment-oriented training, writing articles related to all aspects of housing, urban settlements, infrastructure, project and facility management and advising several companies on these issues. His email id is mpvshanoi@gmail.com.

I was born in Mysore, where I lived till I left the place after graduation in 1956, in search of a job. In 1947, the impact of the Partition of India was negligible in Mysore.

There people were more concerned about the fate of the State, their Maharajah in the new political set up.

The first exposure I had to the Partition that was accompanied by mass displacement of Hindus and Muslims, in which more than one million people were killed, was a small incident that happened in my uncle's residence. I was thirteen years old then. A refugee Hindu family had arrived in sleepy Mysore. They had made their way into the drawing room of my uncle's house, who was fairly affluent. He was also an inactive member of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS).

Reginald was born in Lahore before Partition. He writes books on various subjects pertaining to South Asia. A former London journalist, he now lives in Mid Wales with his actor wife Jamila. His latest book is Shaheed Bhagat Singh and the Forgotten Indian Martyrs, Abhinav Publications, New Delhi. A member of the Society of Authors, he is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.

My uncle Lawrence Massey, my mother’s cousin, was a tough type. He ran away from Lahore to Bombay in the 1920s.

Somehow, he managed to join the Mogul Line, a British-owned steamship company that specialised in taking Indian Muslims to the port of Jeddah, from where they proceeded to Mecca for the Haj. He became an engineer on a steamship called the SS Alavi, though it is doubtful if he ever had a steamship-engineering certificate.

Bimla Goulatia got her doctor’s degree (MBBS) from Government Medical College, Amritsar, and then joined the Indian government's Employees' State Insurance Corporation, India (ESIC). She rose to the rank of Director in their Headquarter at Delhi when She took voluntary retirement from this organisation.

Editor's note: Mr. M. P. V. Shenoi has facilitated the writing and publication of this story.

Like many Hindus who were living in West Punjab at the time of partition of India in 1947, my parents had crossed over to truncated East Punjab, losing most our assets. My father had been rehabilitated as a professor in the Government College, Hoshiarpur. With the help of some friends in Pakistan, he had been able to bring back some family assets. Ed. note: her story of the family's move is available here and her brother's story is available here.

Yashpal Sethi was born on September 7, 1931 in Mohalla Shah Chanchrag, Bazaar Sarafan, Rawalpindi, and moved to India after the Partition of India. He joined the Punjab National Bank in 1953 and retired from the Bank in September 1992. He returned to Pakistan in 2006 to visit Murree, Rawalpindi and Lahore, when he had a memorable time visiting various places, including his ancestral home, which today is a commercial complex. Now he lives in Yamunanagar, Haryana and is quite active on social media such as Facebook.

Editor's note: This article is based on an interview conducted by Gurpreet Singh Anand in 2013, and is presented as a report of this interview. Additional material has been taken from Yashpal Sethi's blog http://yashpalsethi.wordpress.com/

Gurpreet was born in India to parents who fled from Rawalpindi and Murree, where the family had cloth shops, as ‘refugees.' His father, though from a business family, was a full time member of the communist party and a freedom fighter. His father died when Gurpreet was 10 years old, leaving behind a diary of the events in 1947\; Gurpreet has always been intrigued by this diary. Gurpreet, now an avid traveller and businessman, keeps searching for people who were traumatised by the partition of India. He interviews them to record their memories, and keeps in touch with people of similar interest in Rawalpindi.

Editor's Note: According to Richard Stevenson's book "Bengal Tiger And British Lion, An Account of the Bengal Famine of 1943," on November 9, 1943, the Mayor of Calcutta sent a telegram to the Emperor of India asking him to "appoint a Royal Commission to investigate the causes that led to the famine in Bengal causing death of thousands of men women and children in the Province." In June 1994, the Viceroy set up a Famine Inquiry Commission to "investigate and report to the Central Government upon the causes of the food shortage and subsequent epidemics in India, and in particular in Bengal, in the year 1943." This Commission was headed by a retired ICS officer, Sir John Ackroyd Woodhead, and  included Mr. Afzal Husain, who wrote a minute of dissent (reproduced below), and Sir Manilal Nanavati, who secretly saved the detailed papers of the Commission against the Chairman's orders.

Mr. Husain's dissent is reproduced below. The complete report is available in the attached pdf files.

Photos of the Bengal famine are available at http://www.oldindianphotos.in/2009/12/bengal-famine-of-1943-part-1.html

Editor's Note: According to Richard Stevenson's book "Bengal Tiger And British Lion, An Account of the Bengal Famine of 1943," on November 9, 1943, the Mayor of Calcutta sent a telegram to the Emperor of India asking him to "appoint a Royal Commission to investigate the causes that led to the famine in Bengal causing death of thousands of men women and children in the Province." In June 1994, the Viceroy set up a Famine Inquiry Commission to "investigate and report to the Central Government upon the causes of the food shortage and subsequent epidemics in India, and in particular in Bengal, in the year 1943." This Commission was headed by a retired ICS officer, Sir John Ackroyd Woodhead, and  included Mr. Afzal Husain, who wrote a minute of dissent (available on this website), and Sir Manilal Nanavati,who secretly saved the detailed papers of the Commission against the Chairman's orders.

The conclusions of the Commission are reproduced below. The complete report is available in the attached pdf files. Photos of the Bengal famine are available at http://www.oldindianphotos.in/2009/12/bengal-famine-of-1943-part-1.html

CHAPTER XI.-GENERAL CONCLUSIONS AND OBSERVATIONS.

Source:  A. Berriedale Keith, ed. Speeches and Documents on Indian Policy, 1750-1921. Vol. I. London: Humphrey Milford, Oxford University Press, 1922, 266-274.

Editor's note: This Act created the post of Governor-General of India, which continued in India until the adoption of the Indian constitution in 1950. The Act also created a 4-member Council to work with the Governor-General.

III.          Provided always, and be it enacted, that from and after the said twenty-second day of April one thousand eight hundred and thirty-four the exclusive right of trading with the Dominions of the Emperor of China, and of trading in tea [53 Geo. 3, c. 155], continued to the said Company by the said Act of the fifty-third year of King George the Third, shall cease.

Editor's note: In  April 1919, under order of General Dyer, troops opened fire on a crowd at Jallianwala Bagh, Amritsar, killing 379 unarmed civilians and wounding over a thousand. The Commander-in-Chief in India recommended that Dyer should be ordered to retire, and the matter came before the Army Council for review. The Council accepted the recommendation, as did the British Cabinet.

Winston Churchill  defended the Cabinet's decision in Parliament, though he called the firing "a monstrous event." The editor has highlighted certain passages.

This is taken from http://lachlan.bluehaze.com.au/churchill/am-text.htm

Following extracts taken from
Hansard House of Commons (U.K.) Proceedings
July 8th, 1920, Supply-Committee, Punjab Disturbances, pp 1719 - 1734

http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1920/jul/08/army-council-and-general-dyer

This includes Churchill's complete speech.

The SECRETARY of STATE for WAR