Based on Thy Hand, Great Anarch! India 1921–1952, Nirad C. Chaudhuri’s eyewitness account of the killing and expulsion of Delhi’s Muslims in September 1947.

About the Author

Nirad C. Chaudhuri (1897–1999) was a Bengali Hindu writer and cultural critic. He is seen as one of the most striking Indian prose writers of the twentieth century. He was born in Kishoreganj, now part of Bangladesh, and grew up in a Hindu Bengali home. He worked for years as a journalist. During the events described in this book, he worked as a commentator for All India Radio in Delhi. That job put him close to the government even as the city fell into the massacre of Muslims happening outside his door.

Chaudhuri’s first memoir, The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian (1951), had already made him a controversial figure in India. He dedicated that book to the British Empire’s role in Indian life. Thy Hand, Great Anarch!, published in 1987, is the second part of that story. It covers the end of British rule and the birth of independent India, including the horrors of Partition. Chaudhuri was a Hindu who was hard on both Hindu nationalism and Congress nationalism. That outlook shapes how he tells the story below.

What He Saw

The chapters on September 1947 are some of the most painful pages in Indian memoir writing. They work as real eyewitness history because Chaudhuri does not let either side off easy. He was writing from inside Delhi as a radio commentator. He had a close view of a disaster that official broadcasts, in his words, were hiding even as it happened right outside.

A City Undone

Chaudhuri says the massacre of Muslims was not a sudden riot. He calls it an organized expulsion. In his account, Muslim homes, markets, and neighborhoods were targeted on purpose, not hit by accident. Armed bands, some tied to Hindu and Sikh groups, moved through the streets in the open. The book does not spare any side, including his own community.

The Numbers Behind the Massacre

Chaudhuri’s account matches what the historical record shows.

Before Partition, the 1941 census counted about 918,000 people in Delhi. Roughly a third of them, about 300,000 people, were Muslim. By September 1947, that community was under attack across the city.

More than 100,000 Muslims fled their own neighborhoods and became refugees inside Delhi itself. The Mughal-era monuments of Purana Qila and Humayun’s Tomb, built as symbols of the city’s Muslim past, turned into crowded camps. Purana Qila alone held an estimated 80,000 to 100,000 people waiting for trains to Pakistan. Humayun’s Tomb held tens of thousands more.

By the 1951 census, Delhi’s population had nearly doubled to 1.7 million, swelled by Hindu and Sikh refugees from West Pakistan. But the Muslim share of the city had crashed to about 7 percent. Somewhere between 300,000 and 350,000 Muslims left Delhi, driven out or fled in fear, in the space of a few months.

A Passage in His Own Words

Chaudhuri’s harsh judgment on Indian political life was not limited to Partition. Writing about Gandhi’s wider project for India, he says the goal was to “abandon civilized life and revert to a primitive existence.” That same suspicion of what he calls the “primitive passions” running under the surface of Indian politics is the lens through which he views the Delhi killings.

The State That Wasn’t There

The book’s strongest pages describe the collapse of the Delhi police force. Muslim officers had fled, and the force was weak and unsure of itself. In Chaudhuri’s telling, many police stood by or even backed the rioters instead of stopping them. His picture of Purana Qila and Humayun’s Tomb turned into squalid refugee camps, for a community that had made up nearly a third of the city, is written with a cold, controlled horror. That restraint hits harder than melodrama would. Chaudhuri also turns on Delhi’s Hindu middle class. He accuses them, bluntly, of profiting from and quietly approving what happened to their Muslim neighbors.

Nehru, Patel, and the Limits of Leadership

Chaudhuri’s read of India’s leaders is where the book gets most interesting. He gives Jawaharlal Nehru credit for real anguish and physical courage. Nehru drove into riot zones himself. But Chaudhuri argues this was heroism standing in for governance, a sign that the state had failed, not a fix for it. Vallabhbhai Patel gets a more mixed verdict. Muslims and foreign reporters saw Patel as cold to their suffering. Chaudhuri reads him as a man focused only on keeping the state alive, whatever the cost. The gap between Nehru’s ideals and Patel’s hard realism, in Chaudhuri’s telling, was not just a clash of personalities. It was a crack running through a two-week-old republic. It took the army, and later Gandhi’s fast unto death in early 1948, to finally stop the killing.

A Book With an Argument

What lifts these chapters above simple reporting is the argument Chaudhuri builds on top of them. The book’s title comes from Alexander Pope’s poem The Dunciad. Chaudhuri uses it to frame the Delhi massacre as proof that the moral language of the independence movement, non-violence, secularism, national unity, had never really tamed the primitive passions underneath. It is a bleak argument from a writer with no patience for self-congratulation on any side. That refusal to comfort the reader is why the book still matters as a record of 1947, not just a monument to it.

The Same Pattern, Then and Now

Chaudhuri wrote this decades before the word “Hindutva” became common in English. But his description, organized Hindu and Sikh bands acting freely while the state looked away, is a pattern readers will recognize. It shows up again and again in the history of attacks on Muslims in India. After such attacks, public suspicion often falls on the RSS-led Hindu nationalist movement, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and its allied groups, known together as the Sangh Parivar. Formal proof is hard to pin down, because the RSS is not a registered organization under Indian law, even though it is the parent body of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). India’s government today is run by that party, a political branch of the RSS.

The clearest case of this pattern is Mahatma Gandhi’s own assassination on January 30, 1948, the very event that ended the Delhi killings in Chaudhuri’s account. Nathuram Godse, who shot Gandhi, was a Hindu nationalist. For decades, the RSS said Godse had quit the organization years before the killing. Journalist and historian Dhirendra K. Jha, whose book Gandhi’s Assassin drew on new archival research, concludes that claim was false and that Godse never actually left the RSS. The RSS itself was banned for a time after the assassination, and its leader, M. S. Golwalkar, was jailed.

No independent inquiry has ever been set up to establish who organized the killing and expulsion of Delhi’s Muslims in September 1947. Unlike some later outbreaks of violence in India, which at least drew official commissions, however limited, the 1947 Delhi killings were never formally investigated. The record rests mostly on eyewitness accounts like Chaudhuri’s.

The scale of the change in Delhi’s population is still visible today. In 1941, Muslims made up about a third of Delhi’s people. By the 2011 census, the most recent full count available, Muslims were 12.86 percent of the city, about 2.16 million people out of 16.8 million. The share never came close to recovering what it lost in 1947.

Note: This piece is based on Nirad C. Chaudhuri’s own account in Thy Hand, Great Anarch! and on published census data and historical research. It does not independently verify every claim in the book. Some points, including the disputed history of Godse’s RSS membership, remain debated among historians on points of detail.