31 May 1935: the Quetta earthquake

In the previous chapter, we looked at the Shahi Jirga and the tribal system through which the British ruled Balochistan. This chapter tells the story of one night that turned the provincial capital to rubble within seconds: the Quetta earthquake of the night of 30 and 31 May 1935. We have three contemporary official or semi-official sources for that night: the collection of the Government of India’s Bureau of Public Information (August 1935); the 1936 paper by C. P. Skrine, Political Agent for Kalat and Chagai; and the 1940 report by R. O. C. Thomson, an engineer of the North Western Railway. Their figures for the dead differ, so we give each figure with its source.

Three in the morning

According to Skrine, Quetta was at the height of spring that Friday night. The next day there was a garden party at the Residency of Sir Norman Cater, Agent to the Governor General, and on Monday the parade for the King’s birthday. Skrine watched a film in Quetta, left for Mastung at 12.30am and went to sleep at 1.45am. According to the Government of India’s summary of 21 June 1935, the earthquake struck at 3am on 31 May. Thomson gives the time as 3.03am. The bulletin of the International Seismological Centre (ISC) records the time of the shock as 21:32:57 UTC on 30 May, which is about 3.03am Indian Standard Time.

What happened underground

The ISC bulletin gives the surface-wave magnitude of the earthquake as 7.5. In the same bulletin, other researchers’ surface-wave estimates range from 7.4 to 7.6. W. D. West of the Geological Survey of India inspected the affected area in the month after the earthquake. According to Skrine, West put the zone of greatest destruction at about 68 miles long and 16 miles wide, from Bailey to Mand Haji north of Kalat. He placed the focus at a shallow depth, probably less than five miles, and cautiously pointed to a previously unknown fault. Ground fissures about 65 miles long were found, from south of Chiltan to near Kalat. Two miles west of Mastung Road station, where the fissure crossed the Nushki railway line, the track was torn up and bent. According to Skrine, more than 100 people had died in the 1931 Mach earthquake, but no lives were lost in Quetta then.

Morning in Mastung

Skrine’s eyewitness account is the closest description of that night. He writes that when he woke he was standing in darkness under a doorway, and his bed was buried under the debris of the ceiling. By morning it was clear that the whole town of Mastung was in ruins and that 60 to 70 per cent of the people were dead or injured. The telegraph line was down. On his way to Quetta he saw a rail-motor trolley on the track, carrying the Divisional Superintendent towards Bolan to see whether the line had survived. In Skrine’s view, the Superintendent’s telegrams sent from Kolpur were the Government of India’s first news of the disaster. In the Civil Lines of Quetta “hardly a house” was standing, while in the cantonment the destruction stopped half a mile beyond the Habib Nullah, and the military hospitals survived.

Army and railway: rescue and evacuation

According to the Government of India’s summary of 21 June, almost the whole of Quetta’s police force had been lost, so General Karslake, head of Western Command, took charge of the administration together with Sir Norman Cater. According to the summary, within 45 minutes of the earthquake British and Indian soldiers were clearing debris in the dark, and in the first 24 hours nearly 5,000 injured people were treated. Skrine writes that all of Quetta had come under martial law and that rescue work had been under way since 3.30am. Over the next three days the army pulled out hundreds of survivors and more than 3,000 bodies. A refugee camp was set up at the racecourse. On the afternoon of 2 June the city was closed on medical advice. On 4 June, because of the stench and the risk of epidemic, the clearing of debris was halted and a military cordon was thrown around the city.

Here the railway proved its worth, the same railway we discussed two chapters ago. According to the official summary, the railway had not been badly damaged, and on 2 June six special trains left for Punjab and Sindh. According to the report of 10 June, about 20,000 people had been taken out by special trains since 1 June, and 636 patients by ambulance trains. Skrine writes that a fear was widespread among local people that Chiltan had become a volcano, and that this fear made the evacuation easier. According to the report of 17 June, 6,000 to 7,000 people from Dera Ghazi Khan had been killed in Quetta. Martial law ended on 28 June 1935, when the British Baluchistan (Emergency Administration) Regulation came into force.

How many died?

No single final figure exists; even the official estimates changed over the weeks:

• Official report of 3 June: 26,000 dead out of Quetta city’s population of about 40,000.
• 6 June: the figure of 56,000 printed in newspapers “cannot be confirmed”.
• 7 June: an estimate of 12,000 to 15,000 dead in the villages, and a total “probably in excess of 40,000”.
• 10 June: 2,900 dead and 5,000 injured in Kalat State.
• Summary of 21 June: “thirty thousand people were killed”.
• Skrine (1936): at least 24,000 in Quetta city, 3,000 in the surrounding villages and 3,250 in Kalat State; according to him, about 1,125 people died in and around Mastung.
• Thomson (1940): about 20,000 in Quetta, and about 7,000 in the villages and Kalat State. According to him, a memorial tablet to 154 railway employees and 489 of their relatives was placed at the new Quetta station.

On the same site, on new principles

The biggest question was where the city should be rebuilt. According to Thomson, the Government of India decided in its resolution of 24 December 1935 to rebuild Quetta on the same site; Skrine cites an official communiqué of the day before. The Geological Survey’s opinion, included in that resolution, was that the whole of Balochistan is earthquake country and that earthquake-resistant construction is necessary everywhere, and that with this precaution Quetta is no less safe than any other place. According to Skrine, another argument was that none of the bungalows the North Western Railway had built in Quetta after 1931 on a rail-frame structure had fallen. Thomson also writes that these buildings stood undamaged in the 1935 shock.

In August 1935 the Technical Sub-Committee of the Central Quetta Reconstruction Committee drew up principles and rules for “earthquake-proof” buildings. According to Thomson, these required a building to withstand a horizontal force of one-eighth of gravity (G/8); after 1931 the railway had adopted G/10. The rules proved so expensive that they were later relaxed. By 1940 the railway had built 2,639 quarters to an earthquake-resistant standard, of which 1,259 were in Quetta. Skrine writes that the debris of the old city was being carried by a small railway line and dumped in pits outside the city, and that the cost of reconstruction was estimated at about one crore rupees a year for at least seven years.

Rebuilding in the villages was a separate story. According to the 1936-37 administration report of the Baluchistan Agency, zamindars of Quetta were given earthquake-proof quarters from the Viceroy’s Relief Fund, while in Kalat State, after the karezes were cleared, frames for 1,722 huts were supplied and 560 more were planned.

Skrine ended his paper with the remark that all this happened “in twenty seconds”. After that night, every new building in Quetta rose with the memory of it.