09-17-2006, 04:11 AM
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->One major contribution of this book is to nail the claim to authenticity of different varieties of sources of information, very much including the sacrosanct official records, eyewitness accounts and the memories of the high and mighty who were in charge. The estimates of death toll, it is pointed out, ranges from 2,00,000 to two million. Not one of these is based on any dependable calculation. The eyewitness accounts are often no better than rumours, honed and streamlined through constant repetition. When explored in any depth by an interrogator, the firm surface of the stories splinter and the "truth" looks very different from the received and widely accepted version. General Tuker, writing when his memory served, spoke of the women of Garhmukteswar cheering when their devilish men were busy butchering Muslim women. Historians of Pakistan have invariably cited this authoritative evidence as the basic truth concerning Hindu villainy. Tuker nowhere mentions the source of his information, probably because there was none. He writes that there was no British police officer in U.P. at the time. He forgets that the D.I.G. of police was an Englishman, Robinson. The heroic accounts of Hindus/ Sikhs suffering martyrdom rather than accept conversion and multiple humiliations give way when pushed, to reveal very human failures of courage and anxious efforts to escape, anyway, anyhow. Martyrdom, especially of women, are often imposed against their will or accepted with uncertainty and hesitation.
The construction put upon the violence also varied. Sometimes it is heroic revenge against a community guilty of savagery against one's own in some far away place; Bihar avenging Noakhali, western Punjab avenging Bihar, Garhmukteswar avenging Western Punjab and so on. At other times there is a sense of shame: it is really the responsibility of the other community, or of criminal or bigoted elements in one's own or innocent villagers misled by vicious fanatics. Sometimes it is outsiders who commit the crime, not the residents of one's own village. Sometimes it is the innate perfidy of Hindus or violence built into the Muslim psyche. Most spectacularly, there is the grand colonial perception. It is the monstrous Biharis whom the wise white rulers had expelled from the army after the horrors of 1857. But then one has to explain the Jats, loyal sepoys of the British Indian army. But it is not really that difficult: their natural savagery, kept in control under the iron discipline of British rulers, would break through whenever that discipline slackened. All is explained. One's perception of the past â imperialist, nationalist or communal â determined the interpretation of the violence.
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The construction put upon the violence also varied. Sometimes it is heroic revenge against a community guilty of savagery against one's own in some far away place; Bihar avenging Noakhali, western Punjab avenging Bihar, Garhmukteswar avenging Western Punjab and so on. At other times there is a sense of shame: it is really the responsibility of the other community, or of criminal or bigoted elements in one's own or innocent villagers misled by vicious fanatics. Sometimes it is outsiders who commit the crime, not the residents of one's own village. Sometimes it is the innate perfidy of Hindus or violence built into the Muslim psyche. Most spectacularly, there is the grand colonial perception. It is the monstrous Biharis whom the wise white rulers had expelled from the army after the horrors of 1857. But then one has to explain the Jats, loyal sepoys of the British Indian army. But it is not really that difficult: their natural savagery, kept in control under the iron discipline of British rulers, would break through whenever that discipline slackened. All is explained. One's perception of the past â imperialist, nationalist or communal â determined the interpretation of the violence.
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