The Architect of Two Partitions or a Federalist Daydreamer? The Curious Case of Reginald Coupland
Arie Dubnov, School of History, University of Haifa
What was, if at all, the connection between the early, pre–‐1945 partition proposals for Ireland and Palestine, and the British imperial federalist vision? How can we move beyond comparative politics towards a transnational history of partitions, and a history that would allow us to recognize not only similarities but also links and contacts between partitions architects operating in such remote, geographically separated regions? And was the idea of partition, in a sense, a “travelling theory,” transplanted in a top–‐down fashion by colonial administrators in various parts of the Empire, or was it, alternatively, a much more complicated conglomerate of ideas, product of a dialogue and negotiation with local actors and grassroots nationalists?
The aim of this paper is to start answering these questions by looking at a specific individual, Sir Reginald Coupland (1884 –1952). Beit Professor of Colonial History at Oxford and editor of the Round Table group’s influential quarterly, Coupland was not only a prolific author and an acute observer of the three major partitions that changed the contours of the British Empire during the first half of the twentieth century, but also a key political actor who sought to resolve the ethno–‐ religious conflicts in Palestine and the British Raj in India through innovative, often radical constitutional reforms and political schemes. Soon after he was appointed member of Lord Peel’s Royal Commission of Inquiry and sent to Palestine, Coupland became the key author of the commission’s report (1937), which famously recommended to create two separate Arab and Jewish states and a new mandatory government. During WWII, while he was still actively engaged in advocating partition for Palestine, Coupland began investigating the problems of Indian constitutional politics, first as Nuffield College Research Fellow and later as member of Cripps mission to India (1942), and both projects brought him in close proximity to the main advocates and architects of partition in the Punjab.
Given his remarkable career, one is tempted to regard Coupland as the architect of two partitions. Indeed, to a large degree Coupland functioned as the perfect “idea carrier,” a human vessel helping 2 to transport the idea of partition from one end of the Empire to the other. The fact that the partitions in the Indian subcontinent and the Middle East eventually took place almost simultaneously, in 1947–‐8, and the fact they resulted in the emergence of three new sovereign nation states –‐–‐ India, Pakistan and Israel –‐–‐ should also be taken into account. For some, it suggests that the ideas Coupland formulated during the 1930s and early 1940s ultimately provided some of the conceptual foundations for post–‐WWII decolonization process, which made a new hyphenated creature –‐–‐ the nation–‐state –‐–‐ the standard, default building block of international order.
And yet, a careful reexamination of Coupland’s life and thought, and a closer reading of his published as well as unpublished papers, reveals a far more complex story and set of ideas. Furthermore, scrutinizing linear narratives about the birth of the post–‐1945 nation–‐state, it discloses a contingent, uneven history of partition politics and a non–‐linear story of the origins of these three states. First and foremost, reading Coupland in context, my talk argues, Coupland’s political ideas would be better understood if read against the backdrop of a longstanding tradition of imperial federalist thought originating in the Victorian era, reshaped and reformulated after the South African (Boer) War and the first World War, and in debates surrounding the 1921 partition of Ireland. As much as it was an innovation, when partition was originally proposed for Palestine in the late thirties, the idea was not incompatible with numerous other political schemes invented at the aftermath of WWI and the so–‐called “Wilsonian Moment” to expand the British Commonwealth of Nations and to “contain” nationalist movements within the Empire, allowing them a greater degree of self–‐government without full sovereignty.
Second, despite its image as a “Solomonic trial” imposed in a top–‐down manner by colonial rulers from the metropole on the colonial subjects in its periphery, partition was in fact a result of an intense, at times even intimate dialogue between these two unequal parties. As the case of Palestine clearly shows, pre–‐existing schemes of separation, “cantonization” and division offered by local actors can and should be read as part of the prehistory of the partition. Active and effective lobbying efforts, open testimonies as well as secret and semi–‐secret diplomacy gave colonial subjects numerous opportunities to voice their concerns and to present their visions for the future of the region. Surprising as it may seem, many of those plans and visions were not incompatible with the type of Liberal Imperialist vision of Greater Britain that impelled people like Coupland. In that sense would be wrong to describe Coupland as the auteur, namely the sole author of the Palestine partition as some historians did, nor would it be accurate to see partition policies as the undisturbed continuation of older forms of colonial divide et impera (“divide and rule”) policies. Furthermore, moving to St. Asia I show that Coupland rejected the idea of partition explicitly and fiercely, arguing it was neither a practical nor a desirable solution for the Hindu–‐Muslim friction. In that case as well, grassroots politics and increasing radicalization, not simply top–‐down British intervention, had a huge impact on the push towards partition.
Third and last, I would suggest that it would be better to avoid regarding partition as a single idea and start viewing it instead as a set of ideas or interrelated theories that composed together a package deal. This set of ideas included, next to the emphasis on clear–‐cut territorial divisions, also 3 new notions concerning ethnic unmixing and population exchange as well as novel attempts to re–‐ think notions of sovereignty and self–‐rule. Such a reconceptualization and reappraisal, I conclude, allows us to appreciate the historical specificity of the
Ex-colony seeking global influence: What India can learn from the Imperial Tale”
Dr. Rajmohan Gandhi, Research Professor, Center for South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, and Academic Director of the Global Crossroads International Living/Learning Community.
In 2016, the creation of Pakistan and India’s independence-cum-partition will be a 69-year-old story, and the partition of Palestine and the creation of Israel a 68-year-old one. This span of almost seven decades, during which countries like India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Palestine, Israel and Syria have witnessed instructive experiences, is surely long enough to yield new ideas.
Focusing mainly though not solely on the South Asian experience, my proposed paper, tentatively titled, “Ex-colony seeking global influence: What India can learn from the Imperial Tale,” will search for some of them. Among the questions it will ask are: What was the essence of the evil of imperialism? What was the core reason for its success?
Also, has the age of Empire really ended? Are partitions devices only of the past, or is the world likely to see more of them? Again, what are the truths that Empire took from Colony, and vice versa? Was something flawed in the opposition to Empire that contributed to Partition?
‘You are not one’ was Empire’s standard charge against Colony as well as its justification for continuance. What can we usefully learn from Colony’s efforts to disprove the charge?
As far as India is concerned, it is now a significant world power in many senses including the demographic, economic, cultural, and even strategic. So the question has to be asked: How does a former colony ensure that its present and future global influence avoids the overreach of imperialism?
Ireland, Partition, and the Indian Revolutionary Imagination
Dr Pranav Jani, Associate Professor, English (Postcolonial Studies and US Ethnic Studies) The Ohio State University
Indian revolutionaries in the early years of the 20th century held Ireland and its anticolonial struggle in high regard. For instance, the Ghadar Party of San Francisco celebrated the Easter 1916 uprising, an event that the Chittagong Army Raiders aimed to reenact in 1930, and hosted Republican leader Eamon de Valera on his US tour in 1919-1920. As Michael Silvestri has demonstrated in Ireland and India, Indian radicals saw in the Irish, especially after 1916, an example of militancy, global political consciousness, and self-sufficiency.
This paper describes the high period of Indian-Irish collaboration and then moves into investigating a series of larger questions. What was the impact of the partition of Ireland on Indian radicals? How did their own experience of partition—in Bengal between 1905 and 1911—shape their understanding of the event? Did Ireland remain as a model for Indian anticolonial struggle after the War of Independence turned into a Civil War? My preliminary investigations suggest that in the US, one of the key sites of Indian-Irish collaboration, Irish support to Indian radical groups slowed down and then disappeared after partition, and many Indians agreed with the Republican critique of the South. Nevertheless, many regarded Irish freedom, however partial, as an important victory.
Examining histories, literature, and political writings, I aim to draw out a more precise and historicized understanding of what global anticolonial solidarity looked like amidst the changing and uneven political fortunes of nation-states.
Rebels in the Uniform of Empire: Anti-Colonial Solidarity and the 1920 Connaught Mutiny
Dr Brian Kelly, School of History and Anthropology, Queen’s University Belfast
In the summer of 1920, unrest began to take hold among the ranks of Irish soldiers deployed in British Army regiments in India. Angered by news about atrocities being committed by imperial troops—most notoriously the ‘Black and Tans’—then stationed in Ireland. At the Jullunder Barracks in the north of India, four Irish men—all veterans of the Great War—turned themselves in to military authorities on the 28th of June, declaring that they no longer wished to serve in the British Army. Fully expecting to be court-martialed, perhaps executed. But when word of their defiance spread to others in the ranks of the Connaught Rangers, a full-scale mutiny developed, and eventually spilled out beyond the barrack walls, winning sympathy and active support from Indians in the vicinity.
Using the 1920 mutiny as its backdrop, this paper will examine the basis for anti-colonial solidarity between Irish and Indian revolutionaries in the early twentieth century, paying special attention to the transformative experience of service in the imperial war machine as a source of internationalism. The effects of the mutiny on postwar Ireland, India, and other nations dominated by ruling Britannia will be explored, along with some reflections on the long-term development of anti-colonial ties in the twentieth century.
‘Unraveling a National Symbol: Museums of South Asia, Partition and the Question of Lahore’
Aparna Kumar, PhD Candidate Department of Art History University of California, Los Angeles
The museum’s close ties to the nation-state have long been central to its history in South Asia. Though introduced to the Indian subcontinent in the nineteenth century, as an instrument of British colonial power, museums in India and Pakistan were quickly refashioned in the 1940s, as a crucial vehicle for national politics and identity. While the museum’s historic ties to Enlightened, rational thought, and Western conceptions of progress made it an important declaration of civilization and power, museums erected anew at Delhi and Karachi proved to be key players in the production of nationalist art historiographies, that which have over time lent added credence to India and Pakistan’s separate claims to sovereignty.
Lesser explored, however, are the histories of violence and disjuncture that punctuate this otherwise triumphant historical progression and transformation of museums in South Asia, histories often suppressed by the fervor of nationalist rhetoric on both sides of the border. Of concern to this paper, in particular, are those experiences catalyzed by the violence and trauma of partition in the 1940s that tend, by contrast, to configure the museum in South Asia less as a symbol of creation and national pride, and more as a site of destruction and loss.
Specifically, this paper examines the history of the Lahore Museum, and the process by which its collections were violently split between India and Pakistan in 1949. Central to my analysis are the physical ramifications of this process of division, that which saw priceless antiquities disassembled and destroyed, as well as the ideological relationship that develops in the 1950s between the Lahore Museum, and its counterpart across the border at Chandigarh, where the Lahore Museum’s ‘exiled’ collections in India eventually found refuge.
Ultimately, this paper seeks to unsettle prevailing claims that inscribe the museum as national in South Asia. It links the history of the Lahore Museum to discourses on exile, displacement and dispossession, and in so doing re-positions the museum in South Asia as a site of physical and ideological tension, where the politics of partition continue to unfold. In deference to my larger dissertation project on partition and visual culture in India and Pakistan, of which this paper is a vital part, my analysis of the Lahore Museum will also be a means to explore partition’s larger epistemological ramifications for the field of South Asian art history today.
‘Promoting Sedition’: The Irish Language in the Orange State after Partition
Dr Feargal Mac Ionnrachtaigh, Post-Doctoral Researcher in the Institute for Collaborative Research in the Humanities at Queens University Belfast
This paper will briefly explore Ireland’s colonisation as part of the wider British imperial project that led to the demise of the Irish language as Ireland’s spoken language. This decline, it will be argued, was dictated by the political, economic and cultural necessities of British imperialism in Ireland. Through comparative analysis, this process will be framed into a wider understanding of cultural shift in colonial and neo-colonial contexts.
In the aftermath of imperialist partition in 1920, this colonial context shaped a supremacist settler-colonial ideology that defined the newly founded Unionist state’s overt antipathy towards the Irish language. The paper will discuss the recalcitrant state policies of the Orange State, where legislative repression and marginalization where used against the Irish language community.
The consequences of imperialist repression will be seen to have inspired an ideology of de-colonisation and resistance, which was a central motivating factor in the Irish language revival movement in the North of Ireland from the 1970s to the present. It will examine the survival and development of this movement in spite of a hostile unionist regime as an example of resistance-based language activism in practice.
In conclusion, this paper will discuss the enduring legacy of this settler-colonial ideology to the present, where the language issue remains considerably vexed and unresolved. Despite a power-sharing assembly at Stormont, it will be argued, the new governing arrangements have merely institutionalized sectarianism within a system of British neo-colonial hegemony.
Performing Humanity: Violence and Visuality in Kashmir
Dr Deepti Misri
Divided Mindscapes: Literature, Work, and Displaced Women
Dr Debali Mookerjea-Leonard
Among the many important transformations, ushered in by the Partition, in the lives of displaced Hindu Bengali women, was their large-scale participation in wage-labor. Dislocation, dispossession, and often the loss of male breadwinners in inter-community violence, compelled formerly homebound middle-class women to seek employment in an effort to forestall the family’s economic collapse. While teaching positions were considered “respectable” and favored, displaced women seldom had the luxury to choose their field of work, thus middle-class women applied for jobs which had thus far been stigmatized: door-to-door selling, telephone operating, hawking, and careers in the entertainment industry.
While in recent years, oral historians and ethnographers have gathered refugee women’s testimonies on their experiences as salaried workers, a different archive, Bengali Partition literature has preserved evidence, beginning in the late-1940s, of women’s participation in professional life. Novels and short stories narrate the quiet courage of these women who, without knowing, or intending to, set off a society-wide transformation in the mindscape of Bengali middle-class women (both displaced and non-displaced) that made their employment outside the home not only socially acceptable, but also, respectable.
This paper examines a range of literary representations of the lives of working women. I argue that literary writings reproduce the trauma of Partition in the women’s grim experience of imprisonment within the double bind of wage labor and the family—neither can the working woman find individual self-realization through wage labor, nor does she find fulfillment within the traditional family.
National Identity in Palestine and Northern Ireland
Ibrahim Natil
How does the shifting political structure affect national identity in both Palestine and Northern Ireland? I argue that shifting political structures have produced a complex composite of national identity in the post peace agreements. To what extent have the post agreement institutions influenced national identity and equal citizenship? I examine National identity in the context of post conflict agreement, Northern Ireland in 1998 and Palestine in 1993. In this context, the proposed research also examines the contribution of political movements to the development of post agreement national identity in Northern Ireland and Palestine. To what extent have the post conflict agreements affected and/or changed the notion of national identity in Northern Ireland and Palestine?
I examine various ranges of similarities, discrepancies, circumstances, factors and causes that have influenced national identity. I have already considered various examples and differences of society, culture, regional actors and constitutional changes in Northern Ireland and Palestine. The development of national identity in both countries has a number of common elements as a result of geography, history and religion. The study also examines the impact of the agreements on post conflict social structure and political systems. In the post-cold war environment and structure, there have been a number of external actors playing an important role in supporting as well as challenging the agreements.
Mapping the Future: Imperial Careers and Imagined Partitions in British Palestine
Penny Sinanoglou, Assistant Professor of History, Wake Forest University
There is no doubt that, as Colonial Secretary William Ormsby-Gore argued before
the League of Nations in 1937, “Palestine was unlike any other country with which the
British empire had to deal.” Palestine was not a Crown Colony, it was overseen by an
outside body, and its Jewish settler population was, unlike the white settler populations in
other parts of the empire, overwhelmingly non-British and non-English speaking. But
neither was Palestine cut off from the institutions, experiences and habits of mind that
were molded by and in turn shaped the British empire. Indeed many British officials
came to Palestine having served in other parts of the empire, and not surprisingly they
turned to imperial examples in their search for a solution to the “Palestine problem.”
Through an examination of private papers, administrative documents, maps and reports,
this paper argues that British imperial careers and cross-imperial thinking were critical to
the genesis and development of partition plans for Palestine in the 1920s and 1930s, and
that these plans in fact envisaged a British imperial future in Palestine. Deeply embedded
in imperial professional and intellectual networks, men such as Charles Tegart and
Reginald Coupland turned to partition not as a means by which to end the empire but as a
way to ensure its continuation.