The violence of Partition in 1947 has been estimated to have left between one million and two million people dead. While most of the violence took place outside the approximately 600 princely states that had yet to join either India or Pakistan, recent scholarship has drawn attention to large-scale killings in Jammu and Kashmir, Alwar and Bharatpur in present-day Rajasthan, Patiala and Faridkot in east Punjab and Bahawalpur in west Punjab.
In all these cases, scholars have drawn attention to the complicity of state forces in the violence.
The first part of this series focussed on massacres in Jammu, which changed the demographic balance of the region. But records show that the extent and the intensity of the atrocities in Alwar and Bharatpur states, were equal, if not worse, to those in Jammu.
The most authoritative account of the anti-Muslim violence in the two princely states has been written by Shail Mayaram, a historian and political anthropologist who has studied the Meo Muslim community. Meos live in Mewat – which was part of the erstwhile states of Alwar and Bharatpur, in present-day northern Rajasthan and southern part of current Haryana, all adjoining Delhi.
Mayaram’s 1997 monograph, Resisting Regimes: Myth, Memory and the Shaping of Muslim Identity, is based on archival research and interviews with survivors and some perpetrators of the violence.
The targeting of Meos began first in Bharatpur, in May 1947, spilling over to adjoining Alwar in June, as refugees from Bharatpur poured into that state. The violence reached a peak in August, before ending by the end of the month.
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