Hindu Militarism and Partition in 1940s United Provinces: Rethinking the Politics of Violence and Scale

The United Provinces and its urban centres were not in Partition’s immediate hinterland or a key subject of its high politics, but were pivotal, this paper argues, at an alternative scale of political mobilisation around volunteer movements. Central to this process were the spatial dynamics of organised violence in the early to mid 1940s, not least because of how pivotal organised killings were by 1947. By exploring the provincial patterns of the development of volunteer movements, their spatial and their inter-communal associations over time, and their ideological content (using a case study focussed on P.D. Tandon), the article argues that there were longer-term associations between organised volunteer activities and instances of pre-Partition violence that foreshadowed the large-scale attacks of the summer of 1947. This potentially affects the way historians read Partition violence as a specific ‘moment’ of communal antagonism and the significance of these movements’ ideologies of violence to India’s long Partition.