Intro
This book, first published in 1954 with its revised edition published in 1972, was recognised as the standard work on Indo-Pakistani geography. Part 1 focuses on climate and soils; Part 2 provides a synopsis of the social complexities of the sub-continent; Part 3 examines planning and development; Part 4 is devoted to detailed regional description, both urban and rural (see https://books.google.com/books/about/India_and_Pakistan.html?id=3JEYMQAACAAJ). The book was written by Oskar Spate, he also worked on the Punjab boundary commission in 1947 and seems to have known Muhammad Zafrullah Khan very well. He was hired by the Ahmadiyya Movement in 1947, in terms of the Punjab Boundary Commission. The Mirza family begged him to help them place Qadian into Pakistani, but they failed. He also wrote, “The Partition of the Punjab and of Bengal”, The Geographical Journal, Vol. 110, No. 4/6 (Oct. – Dec., 1947), pp. 201-218 (18 pages), Published by: The Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers). In this journal he mentions how he loved the Ahmadiyya Movement and etc, they employed him as an advisor.
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Oskar Spate was in Qadian in August of 1947
Per Oskar Spate, he was in Qadian in August of 1947 and quickly fled after the Radcliffe award on 17 August 1947. He wrote that there were 12-15,000 people in Qadian, of which the majority were Ahmadi’s, there were most likely 10,000 Ahmadi’s at that time. He wrote that Qadian was like a mini-vatican, crime was reported to the office of the Khalifa, then to the local police, which proves the corruption at Qadian. He also mentions that there was an aircraft at Qadian, a torso of an aircraft which was used as a trainer, he also mentions high-tech chemistry and physics labs, this was most likely the “Indian Air Training Course (IAT)” in Qadian at the T.I. College.

This specific quote comes from the 1954 edition and is as follows:

The pdf
Spate

The data, see pages 215–217
“””Qadian, like Poona, originated in a local jagir; there the resemblance ends. It was1 the headquarters of a heretical and reformist Muslim sect, the Ahmadiyya, founded about 1908 by one Mirza Ahmad, the “Promised Messiah”. This group numbers perhaps a million adherents and has missions not only in the more usual Muslim fields of Africa and Indonesia, but as far as Glasgow and Buenos Aires; it represents a remarkable combination of fundamentalism with a keen appreciation of modern technique. This is not the place to discuss its sociology, fascinating as it is to observe at first hand the growth of a new religious movement; but some points will emerge in the following pages.

According to the Ahmadis, the original land-grant was made by the first Mogul, Babur ( 1526-30). The Ahmadi family lived the usual life of local lords through all the vicissitudes of Mogul rule, Persian and Afghan incursions, Sikh and finally British power, until the great revelation to Mirza Ahmad.
 
For nearly 40 years (1908-47) Qadian was as it were a miniature Vatican; not sovereign, but something of a state within a state. Crime in Qadian, for instance, was invariably reported first to the Ahmadi office and then to the police.
 
Qadian lies in the Bari Doab (E Punjab), 35 miles NE of Amritsar. The old town, still called ‘the Fort’, and retaining traces of a town ditch, is like hundreds of others in SW Asia: some 12-15,000 people (the great majority were Ahmadis) living on the area of an English village of 2000; narrow twisting alleys, encroached on by stalls and swarming with children and donkeys; two bazaar streets, covered with rough awnings of sacking (poor relations of the Damascus suqs), and significantly a Hindu enclave; mud-walled houses, windowless, built round courts where spinning, milking of buffaloes, and all women’s work is carried on; flat roofs littered with rope bedsteads, where the men smoke and gossip in the cool of the evening. A few large brick houses rise like monadnocks out of a peneplain. These include the Ahmadi offices, in a house once belonging to a wealthy Hindu, as is architecturally obvious from the details of the extremely beautiful brick façade and doorways, perhaps 18th century and certainly built when the now-decayed traditions of Hindu architecture were still vigorous; exterior windows are few and small-significantly-but within is a galleried court. Here was the vault containing the treasury, and the offices of a bureaucracy under seven ‘Secretaries of State’, including one for Entertainment of Guests, whose department was wonderfully efficient. An important feature was the guest-house, a caravanserai of courts and cubicles and cookhouses (more hygienic than many in the British Army), where disciples from all the Islamic lands endlessly commented the Quran and the writings of Promised Messiah.
 
From the 120-ft minar of the mosque all this warren lay at one’s feet: to the N stretched the open modern development; to the S, on the rich fields of the Bari Doab, half a dozen large villages, darkly shrouded in mango-groves, seemed to enclose Qadian in a ring: all were Sikh.
 
In the new town, as in the old, women were in the strictest purdah; there were few other common features. Apart from an industrial fringe on the edge of the old town, this area was laid out in wide streets, with strict zoning and regulated densities. Architecture on the whole was poor, but sanitation superior to that in Lahore’s best hotel. The most grandiose building was the big college, PWD Mogul in style, and well equipped especially in physics and chemistry labs; the community had even secured the torso of a crashed plane for preliminary aeronautical instruction.3
 
Between the town and the railway lay the industrial area, largely powered by Mandi hydro-electricity (below, 477 -78). On the fringe of the old town factories were largely private enterprises, but in the more open areas the community was building more modern workshops for vegetable oil, paint

 

Fig. 39. –QADIAN. Based on SOI 44 M/5 ( 1913) with additions from personal observation. 1, Bazaar; 2, Ahmadi admin. and religious centre; 3, Ahmadi cemetery (guest-houses, etc., between 2 and 3); 4, modern planned area (villas, offices). The nearer suburbs are closer-built and more industrial than the Nn protrusion to the railway. Mounds (15-25 ft high) mark old settlements. The area lies midway between the Kasur and Sobraon branches of Bari Doab Canal.

 

and varnish, and plastic industries–linked with research in the college labs. The most important activities actually existing were hosiery and knitwear, and all sorts of light electrical goods, all on a small scale (e.g. plastic presses electrically heated but hand-operated) and with apparently rather happy-go-lucky management; in which Qadian very faithfully reflected conditions in a large sector of Indian industry.

 
In a sense Qadian was a sociological freak, a combination of modern enterprise with fundamentalist theology; one might compare it with Salt Lake City. But the material expression of this duality was by no means un-typical. The day-to-day life of the old town stood on the ancient ways, life as it has been lived in many Asian lands for centuries or millennia. The new, in its slapdash planning, in its architectural tawdriness or rawness (whether the “style” was traditional or modernistic), in its mixture of considerable drive and adroit improvisation with a certain lack of poise and stamina, can be paralleled over and over again on India’s expanding industrial frontiers. But rarely are the contrasts of ancient and modern so sharply pointed within such narrow room; and yet in this too Qadian could stand for an epitome of India, if not of Asia.”””

1 This section must unfortunately be written in the past tense; the material geography is doubtless still there, the spirit has fled. My visit was in August 1947; as a result of the Partition which left it in India, all but 3 or 400 of the Ahmadis have been forced to migrate to Pakistan. For the Ahmadi movement, see W. C. Smith, Modern Islam in India ( 1946), 298-302.

 
2 “I tell the tale that I heard told,” and have no means of checking it; it is inherently not improbable, though some of the embellishments certainly are so, e.g. that at one time during the Mogul decadence the Ahmadis were thought of for the throne of Delhi. But then, anything is credible of a family which speaks of an ancient quarrel with the House of Timur for all the world as if Tamburlaine the Great were a rather unfriendly uncle.


3 To protect this treasure from the natural attentions of small boys, it was surrounded by a brick wall, irresistibly reminiscent of the cuckoo-retaining hedge at Gotham

We have decided to post the entire essay about Spate and the 1947 Boundary commission in the below, https://www.livemint.com/Leisure/5VMCc1s4kkkiGaObGXiZeO/Oskar-Spate-and-the-madness-of-Indian-maps.html

Oskar Spate and the madness of Indian maps

India’s international and state boundaries undulate all over the map, so do the twists, turns and contradictions that form the corpus of ancient and modern Indian history

In December 1955, an Australian geographer named Oskar Spate boarded a ship named the Arcadia from Australia to Colombo. From there he would take another train up to Madras (now Chennai), and thence commence his tour of India. He would witness places and do many things on this tour, but his primary motive was to prepare a revised second edition of his 1954 book India And Pakistan: A General And Regional Geography.

In Madras, he would be joined by a local professor of geography, George Kuriyan, along with some students. The group would then wind their way northwards by rail, via Visakhapatnam (Vizag), Agra, Aligarh and Konark, to Delhi, where Spate arrived just in time to witness the 1956 Republic Day celebrations and a military parade.

At Agra, Spate ran into Jawaharlal Nehru at the Indian Science Congress, which Spate attended as a representative of the Australian and New Zealand Association for the Advancement of Science. Many years later, in 1991, when he wrote a series of personal recollections of his life and work, On The Margins of History: From The Punjab To Fiji, Spate did not recall much about this meeting, except that Nehru had an impressive “intellectual grasp”, and that Spate had brought up something peculiar about the way in which Nehru’s government was redrawing the map of India into states along linguistic lines.

Why, asked Spate, had the district of Jhansi been included in Uttar Pradesh (UP) as a “ridiculous vermiform protrusion” into northern Madhya Pradesh (MP), instead of being incorporated into MP? Surely the residents of Jhansi were much more at home with their neighbours in Gwalior than with the people of Uttar Pradesh? I noticed that myself, said Nehru, and it is odd. India’s prime minister asked his States Reorganization Commission to send an explanation of the Jhansi matter to his office with, presumably, a copy to Spate.

This immediately strikes the reader today like an odd question to ask. Of all the things he could have discussed with Nehru, why pick on the district of Jhansi?

Perhaps this has something to do with Spate’s past history with eccentric Indian cartography. Around a decade before this trip to India, the Australian had been rushed to the country once before. And that had been in July 1947. Following a peculiar set of circumstances, Spate became part of that moment in Indian cartographic history: Partition.

To understand the incomprehensibly complicated nature of Indian history, one need look no further than the nature of its internal and external boundaries. As these international and state boundaries undulate all over the map, so do the twists, turns and contradictions that form the corpus of ancient and modern Indian history. Some of these undulations are (or were) so improbable as to almost seem fictional.

On India’s border with Bangladesh, till no less than two years ago, existed one of the greatest muddles on any map anywhere on the planet. The Wikipedia page for India-Bangladesh enclaves puts it very nicely: “Within the main body of Bangladesh were 102 enclaves of Indian territory, which in turn contained 21 Bangladeshi counter-enclaves, one of which contained an Indian counter-counter-enclave—the world’s only third-order enclave. Within the Indian mainland were 71 Bangladeshi enclaves, containing 3 Indian counter-enclaves.”

Thankfully for the residents of these enclaves, who were miserable for decades, both governments sat down and sorted the mess in 2015. A great loss, however, for map nerds.

There are similar anomalies within India. The vermiform protrusion of Jhansi has already been mentioned. But consider the mess that was the princely state of Baroda. A 1909 map of Baroda shows not so much a state as splashes of ink across the map. Some of these splashes are so small as to be almost invisible. Incorporating Baroda state into the Indian republic was thus not just a matter of unity and statesmanship but also logistical sanity.

The partition of Punjab proved the most problematic. The Congress asked for the boundaries to be drawn well west of Lahore. The Muslim League asked for the line to be drawn east of Amritsar.

All these undulations and anomalies came to a head when the British government, in one final act of imperial largesse, decided to draw the boundary between India and Pakistan. Everyone involved, however, quickly realized that geography has no time for politics. Especially when religion is involved. And few witnesses realized this more than Spate.

During World War II, Spate had several stints in Asia. Stints that saw him injured in the defence of Burma (now Myanmar) and then, quite unexpectedly, working as a military censor in India. After the war, he found himself in London in the summer of 1947. Eventually, he secured a job as a lecturer at the London School of Economics. Just when it seemed that life was settling into a long, austere slog, an unexpected letter arrived at Spate’s doorstep on 30 June 1947.

The letter was from someone Spate had never even heard of: Mirza Ali, the imam of the London Ahmadiyya Mosque. Somebody in the Ahmadiyya community back in the subcontinent had come across an article Spate had written in 1943 on the geography of the regions that would later become Pakistan. The article had impressed them enough to get in touch with the author.

Could Spate, the imam pleaded, help them make the case to Sir Cyril Radcliffe and Radcliffe’s “Boundary Commission” that Qadian fall on the Pakistani side of the border?

Qadian, located around 60km north-east of Amritsar, was the birthplace of the Ahmadiyya movement. It was where the movement’s founder, Mirza Ghulam Ahmed, was born in 1835, and where the first set of followers had proclaimed him the promised caliph. By 1947, the then caliph of the Ahmadiyya movement had chosen to move to what would become Pakistan with his followers.

Spate, who knew nothing of the Ahmadiyyas except that they were a Muslim sect of some sort, jumped at the chance to travel to parts of India he had never seen before, all expenses paid. What he witnessed on his arrival in India was a commission mired in chaos, and faced with an assignment that seemed all but impossible. As historian Lucy P. Chester writes in her book Borders And Conflict In South Asia, Radcliffe, a widely respected lawyer in London, had expected to have at least a year or more to draw the borders. This was first reduced to six months, and then he was finally told he had no more than six weeks to finalize the highly contentious India-Pakistan borders in Punjab and Bengal.

The partition of Punjab proved the most problematic. All the three main parties involved—the Congress, the Muslim League, and the Sikhs—put forth proposals that reflected maximalist positions. Fully expecting that Radcliffe would try to arrive at a compromise, each party asked for as much as it could without appearing ludicrous.

In a nutshell, the situation was as follows. The Congress asked for the boundaries to be drawn well west of Lahore, incorporating the Sikh centre of Nankana Sahib. The Muslim League asked for the line to be drawn east of Amritsar, including Ludhiana and, most importantly, Gurdaspur. The Sikh proposals broadly fell along Congress lines. And then things got infinitely complicated as parties began to make their cases in front of the Boundary Commission, which comprised two Muslim and two non-Muslim judges all reporting to Radcliffe.

Radcliffe himself appeared to remain aloof from all these proceedings (though there has been endless speculation continuing to this day, by many historians, about Radcliffe’s neutrality, his true sympathies, his malleability to suggestions by Lord Mountbatten and so on).

Spate may have immediately noticed the futility of the Qadian problem. Situated as it was to the east of Amritsar, to make the town fall within Pakistan would have required Radcliffe to take a position heavily in favour of the Muslim League.

This was, ultimately, not to be. However, Spate recorded the numerous alternative ideas that kept coming up during the proceedings. For instance, there was a suggestion that Amritsar become something of an Indian enclave in Pakistan, with some sort of thin corridor connecting it to India. This would have made for some splendid cartographic weirdness but was a political impossibility. Spate also noticed at least one instance of opportunism. While going through a Muslim League proposal in which the border followed the track of the Sutlej river, he noticed a small outcrop jutting to the east off the river, into India, bounded by straight lines. On enquiring, he was told that a prominent Muslim League member had an estate that sat to the east of the river and wished to incorporate that into Pakistan.

Spate appears to have developed something of a soft corner for the Ahmadiyyas. He found Qadian and its residents quite charming, if prone to a certain fundamentalism. “I felt it was a privilege,” he later wrote, “to be introduced to such a strange but attractive society.” Ultimately, Spate’s efforts proved futile. The Radcliffe Award, announced not on Independence Day but two days later, meant that Qadian remained very much in India. The Ahmadiyyas would eventually move their headquarters to Rabwah in Pakistan.

The Australian geographer left Karachi in 1947, fearing for the future of both countries (but he appears to have been particularly concerned with Pakistan’s fortunes). His assignment may have failed but, he later recalled, he at least had a bag of basmati rice to take back to London with him. Which was nothing to scoff at in a Britain still reeling under wartime rationing.

A decade later, when he came back to India, he was puzzled by Jhansi, yes, but also the transformation he had witnessed in India. As he witnessed the Republic Day festivities in Delhi, he was struck, he later wrote, by the “increase in self-reliance and realism” that seemed to permeate so many levels of Indian society. “Broadly speaking, I came in a mood of qualified pessimism, I left in a mood of guarded optimism.”

What of Jhansi then? The States Reorganization Committee explained to Spate, according to his recollection, many years later in 1991, that Jhansi had been included in UP and not MP at the express request of the residents of the district. Used to being part of the British-administered United Provinces, the locals didn’t want to risk being part of a new state that was cobbled together from local kingdoms. No thanks, they said. At least UP has a legacy of administration. We used to be a little appendage to the United Provinces, and we would like to stay a little appendage of Uttar Pradesh.

The irony of this did not escape Spate. The only reason Jhansi was part of the United Provinces was because of Rani Laxmibhai. It was her patriotism that ultimately led to its annexation into the British-controlled territories. Decades later, residents, perhaps inadvertently, had perpetuated that story through the map of Uttar Pradesh.

There is more than one way to read a map.

A sketch of Oskar Spate. Illustration: Jayachandran/Mint

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Links and Related Essay’s

When the Ahmadiyya Khalifa, was forced to flee from Qadian, September of 1947

The British Government created the Indian Air Training Course (IAT) in Qadian at the T.I. College in the 1940’s

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oskar_Spate

https://www.jstor.org/stable/1789950?read-now=1&seq=11#page_scan_tab_contents

The Ahmady-only Company of the British Army (1941), part of the Punjab Regiment

Statistics showing Systematic Over-representation of Ahmadis in the bureaucracy of Pakistan by Charles H. Kennedy

Even in 1987, there were 328 Ahmadi officers in the Pakistani military

Lahori Ahmadis also held high-level political jobs in British India and later Pakistan

Ahmadiyya in Pakistan by S.E. Brush (1955)

http://aaiil.org/text/qadi/art/musleh_pf.shtml

https://ahmadiyyafactcheckblog.com/2019/02/10/what-is-the-talim-ul-islam-high-school-college-at-qadian-and-later-at-rabwah/

https://ahmadiyyafactcheckblog.com/2020/03/15/26-ahmadis-were-killed-in-qadian-during-partition-in-sep-oct-1947/

https://ahmadiyyafactcheckblog.com/2019/07/31/mujeeb-ur-rahman-the-famous-ahmadi-lawyer-in-pakistan-has-died/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Islamia_College

https://ahmadiyyafactcheckblog.com/2020/04/09/how-the-mirza-family-manipulated-the-train-station-at-qadian-in-1928/

https://ahmadiyyafactcheckblog.com/2020/01/10/ahmadiyya-persecution-rates-from-1947-to-1954/

https://ahmadiyyafactcheckblog.com/2019/08/29/riots-in-qadian-after-the-boundary-commission-gave-gurdaspur-to-india-200-ahmadis-killed/

https://ahmadiyyafactcheckblog.com/2020/01/12/per-ahmadiyya-sources-in-july-of-1947-there-were-199-ahmadi-officers-serving-in-the-british-military/

https://ahmadiyyafactcheckblog.com/2019/08/29/riots-in-qadian-after-the-boundary-commission-gave-gurdaspur-to-india-200-ahmadis-killed/

https://ahmadiyyafactcheckblog.com/2019/05/08/the-first-ever-al-fazl-edition-published-from-lahore-in-1947-ahmadiyya-khalifa-asks-for-50-of-your-earnings/

https://ahmadiyyafactcheckblog.com/2018/07/03/the-return-to-qadian-prophecy-by-mirza-basheer-uddin-mahmud-ahmad/

https://ahmadiyyafactcheckblog.com/2018/11/25/bashir-ahmad-orchard-the-first-non-desi-ahmadi-imam/

https://ahmadiyyafactcheckblog.com/2017/10/15/pakistani-muslims-accused-the-govt-of-pakistan-in-1974-of-illegally-giving-rabwah-to-ahmadis/

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