Reading Excerpt from the New Yorker - Exit Wounds

NAME: ______PER: ______Reading Excerpt from The New Yorker - Exit Wounds

1. How many people were estimated to have been “uprooted” during the partition of India?

2. How many people may have been murdered in the partition of India and Pakistan?

3. Mohandas Gandhi exhorted the British to leave India to God or to ?

4. What politicians saw the Congress Party as a party of upper-caste Hindus?

5. While Gandhi stayed in Calcutta trying to stop a bloodbath between Muslims and Hindus his great rival, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, remained in what city?

6. Who said, “a moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we tep out from the old to the new, when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed finds utterance.”

7. How many wars has India and Pakistan fought over Kashmir?

8. What disease killed Jinnah?

9. Ms. Von Tunzelmann charges Britain damaged agriculture in India and did what to industrial growth?

10. The British had a blind faith in what force, that supposedly regulated markets?

11. How many Indians died of famine in 1877 as the viceroy argued famine relief was a misguided policy?

12. How many maharajas were there in India in 1947?

13. What would you describe as the “rights and responsibilities of secular and democratic citizenship?” (not in the reading, your opinion)

14. The British followed a policy of defining communities based on what criteria?

15. What did Winston Churchill hope would remain as a “bulwark of British rule in India?”

16. Why did Lord Willingdon to describe Gandhi as a “terribly difficult little person” in a 1931 letter?

17. What song did Lord Linlithgow enjoy having played every night as he sat for dinner?

18. Churchill is described as knowing as much about the “Indian problem” as George III did of the American colonies.” Is this a flattering remark or a disparaging one?

19. Both Gandhi and Nehru were imprisoned for their role in a Congress party campaign during World War II. What campaign?

20. What type of Pakistan did Jinnah want to create? 21. Tunzelmann describes the subcontinent as “a mess” in 1946 with a growing hostility on the part of Indians towards who/what?

22. Why could Britain not hold onto its “increasingly unstable empire?”

23. Muslims feared the secular nationalism of Gandhi and Nehru was a cover for what?

24. How many people were killed in 3 days of religious rioting in the summer of 1946 in Calcutta?

25. After exposing his ship to German torpedo fire, Mountbatten observed a torpedo “streaking toward” his ship. What did he think to himself?

26. What was Mountbatten’s nickname in the British admiralty?

27. Was Mountbatten a wise politician?

28. The “trickiest” maharajah was the Hindu prince of what province, populated by a Muslim majority?

29. How many days was Cyril Radcliffe given to define the political geography of India and its borders with the new state of Pakistan?

30. The drawing of borders and the crystallizing of national identities along religious lines plunged millions into what state?

31. Right before he died in 1977 Radcliffe gave an explanation of why he never returned to India. What was the reason?

32. What became “the totemic image of the savagery of partition?”

33. How many Muslims were massacred in Gujarat in 2002?

34. What has the problem of Kashmir done to India and Pakistan? (2 effects)

35. What do Indian police and soldiers routinely do to Muslim insurgents in Kashmir?

36. The author writes Churchill’s “expedient boosting of political Islam would eventually unleash” what?

37. What does “the human cost of imperial over-reaching seems unlikely to attain a final tally for many more decades” mean?