, a vivid portrayal of the bloody partition of India, author Bhisham Sahni vividly depicts the atmosphere changing in a violence-wracked village as a plane circles above it thrice. "People ventured out. The fighting seemed to have stopped and dead bodies were being disposed. People went back to their houses to assess their losses in terms of clothes and armaments." Sahni wrote a fictional account of the carnage that accompanied the partition as it split the subcontinent into the new independent nations of India and Pakistan. Religious violence erupted, displacing some 12 million people, and claiming the lives of up to one million people. Fiction might have been mirroring reality when the planes swooped over the troubled villages, suggests Aashique Ahmed Iqbal, an Indian historian. The mere presence of the aircraft, he says, had a deterrent effect, dispersing mobs and giving villages time to prepare their defences. "The aeroplane played a small but highly crucial role during the division of the British empire in India into the independent dominions of India and Pakistan," notes Mr Iqbal in his fascinating book, The Aeroplane and the Making of Modern India. Of the 12 million people who fled from India and Pakistan, the overwhelming majority travelled by train, vehicle, cart and on foot. Up to 50,000 people - or less than 1% of the people evacuated - were flown out of what became India and Pakistan, Mr Iqbal says. A near-complete exchange of population was completed in three months, between September and November in 1947. Image source, Getty Images Image caption, Planes flew over railway tracks to safeguard refugee-laden trains from potential mob ambushes The Royal Indian Air Force (RIAF) - the aerial force of British India and later the dominion of India - would play a key role in quelling diso){kind=link}
In his 1974 novel Tamas (Darkness), a vivid portrayal of the bloody partition of India, author Bhisham Sahni vividly depicts the atmosphere changing in a violence-wracked village as a plane circles above it thrice.
“People ventured out. The fighting seemed to have stopped and dead bodies were being disposed. People went back to their houses to assess their losses in terms of clothes and armaments.”
Sahni wrote a fictional account of the carnage that accompanied the partition as it split the subcontinent into the new independent nations of India and Pakistan. Religious violence erupted, displacing some 12 million people, and claiming the lives of up to one million people.
Fiction might have been mirroring reality when the planes swooped over the troubled villages, suggests Aashique Ahmed Iqbal, an Indian historian.
The mere presence of the aircraft, he says, had a deterrent effect, dispersing mobs and giving villages time to prepare their defences. “The aeroplane played a small but highly crucial role during the division of the British empire in India into the independent dominions of India and Pakistan,” notes Mr Iqbal in his fascinating book, The Aeroplane and the Making of Modern India.