��Slouching Toward Medina 255W ITH THE END of the Second World War, a victorious yet finan-
cially devastated Britain, no longer able to bear the cost or justify the
ideology of its colonial enterprise in India, finally granted to the
greatest symbol of its imperialist ambitions—the jewel in the crown of
its dwindling empire—its long-sought independence. On August 14,
1947, three hundred fifty years of colonial rule in India came to an
end. Yet the day that C. E. Trevelyan predicted would be “the proud-
est monument of British benevolence,” when, “endowed with
[British] learning and political institutions,” India would represent
colonialism’s greatest triumph, became the day in which the fractious
population of the Subcontinent was violently partitioned along reli-
gious lines into a predominantly Hindu India and Muslim Pakistan.
In many ways, the partition of India was the inevitable result of
three centuries of Britain’s divide-and-rule policy. As the events of
the Indian Revolt demonstrated, the British believed that the best way
to curb nationalist sentiment was to classify the indigenous population
not as Indians, but as Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, Christians, etc. The
categorization and separation of native peoples was a common tactic
for maintaining colonial control over territories whose national bound-
aries had been arbitrarily drawn with little consideration for the eth-
nic, cultural, or religious makeup of the local inhabitants. The French
went to great lengths to cultivate class divisions in Algeria, the Bel-
gians promoted tribal factionalism in Rwanda, and the British fos-
tered sectarian schisms in Iraq, all in a futile attempt to minimize
nationalist tendencies and stymie united calls for independence. No
wonder, then, that when the colonialists were finally expelled from
these manufactured states, they left behind not only economic and
political turmoil, but deeply divided populations with little common
ground on which to construct a national identity.
The partition of India was not simply the result of an internal feud
between Muslims and Hindus. Nor was it an isolated event. Indonesia’s
numerous secessionist movements, the bloody border disputes between
Morocco and Algeria, the fifty-year civil war in Sudan between Arab
northerners and Black African southerners, the partitioning of Palestine