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The 1947 Partition Archive

• Today's Story

1947 Partition of India & Pakistan

by C. Ryan Perkins

As the clock struck midnight on August 15, 1947, celebratory shouts of freedom from colonial rule were drowned out by the cries of millions frantically making their way through the corpse-littered landscape of nascent India and Pakistan. After more than one hundred years of British East India Company rule and an additional 90 years of the British Raj, the Indian subcontinent had finally achieved Independence. What should have been a moment of crowning triumph after years of anti-colonial struggle was indelibly marred by unimaginable violence and bloodshed.

Up to two million people lost their lives in the most horrific of manners. The darkened landscape bore silent witness to trains laden with the dead, decapitated bodies, limbs strewn along the sides of roads, and wanton rape and pillaging. There was nothing that could have prepared the approximately 14 million refugees for this nightmare. The 1947 Partition of the Indian subcontinent into the independent nations of Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan was accompanied by one of the largest mass migrations in human history and violence on a scale that had seldom been seen before. As the provinces of the Punjab and Bengal were effectively split in half approximately seven million Hindus and Sikhs and seven million Muslims found themselves in the wrong country. Believing they would return "home," many families left their valuables behind before they packed up their essential belongings and began the trek to India or West or East Pakistan (now Bangladesh). Many never made it.

How could neighboring communities, accustomed to centuries of relative peace have suddenly turned so violently upon one another? One could blame the July 15, 1947 decision by the British to hand over power only a month later on August 15, 1947, a full ten months earlier than anticipated. One could blame the hastily drawn borders, which were created by a British lawyer, Sir Cyril Radcliffe who lacked basic knowledge of India and was given only five weeks to redraw all the borders of South Asia. One could fault the increasingly hostile rhetoric that accompanied the rise of Hindu and Muslim nationalism or the divide and rule policies of the British.

Whereas the popularly accepted narrative of Partition stresses each of these factors and characterizes the violence as neighbor turning against neighbor and bands of weapon-laden young men in the throes of a communal frenzy seeking out their next victims, these interviews provide different perspectives. They not only help illuminate a period that has been difficult to make sense of, but they also provide a challenge to popular narratives of Partition. As more scholars, students, and lay people work with these interviews it is my hope that new histories will be written – ones that balance the political workings of Partition with the lived human experiences.

These Partition memories, as represented in this collection of interviews, underscore the fragility of our humanity, of the depths and heights of which we are capable of falling to and ascending. It is hoped that these personal stories will not only provide a greater level of understanding of the lived experiences of Partition, but that they will serve to bridge the stories from all sides of the borders and remind us that our commonalities are greater than our differences.

The exhibit tile image is a photograph by Margaret Bourke-White/Life Picture Collection/Getty.

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• Introduction

Background: British raj, Indian independence movement, and Muslim separatism

Partition: planning, implementation, and outcome.

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partition of India

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partition of India , division of British India into the independent countries of India and Pakistan according to the Indian Independence Act passed by the British Parliament on July 18, 1947. Set to take effect on August 15, the rapid partition led to a population transfer of unprecedented magnitude, accompanied by devastating communal violence, as some 15,000,000 Hindus , Sikhs , and Muslims rushed to cross the hastily demarcated borders before the partition would be complete. Estimates of the number of people who died during the partition range from 200,000 to 2,000,000. The partition left an indelible mark on the national consciousness of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh , and its legacy continues to influence the countries’ citizens to this day.

Direct British rule of India began in 1858 as a consequence of the Indian Mutiny , a rebellion against the paramountcy of the East India Company . Direct rule was intended to increase Indian representation while preserving British imperial interests, but continued aggravations and injustices in the following decades created an increasingly adamant independence movement. By the 1920s, programs of noncooperation and civil disobedience were placing pressure on the British to grant India self-governance; in 1930 the Indian National Congress (Congress Party), led by Jawaharlal Nehru , promulgated the Purna Swaraj resolution calling for complete independence.

By 1930 a number of Indian Muslims had begun to think in terms of statehood for their minority community separate from a state with a Hindu majority, although many of the most important leaders of the Muslim community, such as Mohammed Ali Jinnah and the Aga Khan III , continued to envisage a single federation of all Indian provinces. Jinnah, the secular leader of the All India Muslim League , hoped that the leadership of the Congress Party would accommodate Muslims’ concerns of a Hindu bias in its high command. By documenting as many incidents as it could gather in reports published during 1939, the league hoped to demonstrate how Congress ministries were insensitive to Muslim demands or appeals for jobs, as well as to their redress of grievances, and had shown partiality toward the Hindu majority.

The divide intensified after the viceroy Lord Linlithgow (governed 1936–43) informed India’s political leaders and populace that they were at war with Germany and Hindu and Muslim leaders split on whether to support the war effort. The first meeting of the Muslim League after the outbreak of World War II was held in March 1940 in Punjab’s ancient capital of Lahore . The famous Lahore Resolution, later known as the Pakistan Resolution, was passed by the largest gathering of league delegates just one day after Jinnah informed his followers that “the problem of India is not of an inter-communal but manifestly of an international character.” The league resolved, therefore, that any future constitutional plan proposed by the British for India would not be “acceptable to the Muslims” unless it was so designed that the Muslim-majority “areas” of India’s “North-Western and Eastern Zones” were “grouped to constitute ‘independent States’ in which the constituent units shall be autonomous and sovereign.” The rifts deepened further when the Congress Party launched the Quit India movement in 1942 to call for immediate independence and British withdrawal; the Muslim League opposed the call because immediate independence would preclude autonomy for Muslims.

After World War II ended, demands for independence were louder than ever, and the 1945 British parliamentary victory of Clement Attlee , who pledged to grant India independence, lent greater certainty to British withdrawal from the subcontinent. With the stakes rising, the simmering Hindu-Muslim tensions erupted. Jinnah called for a “direct action day” on August 16, 1946, which spiraled into communal rioting that left thousands dead in what was later remembered as the “Great Calcutta Killing.” The event was met soon after with reprisals in a deeply divided Bengal , and the cycle of violence later spread to other provinces.

In March 1947 Louis Mountbatten arrived in India as its last viceroy of the British Empire . He had instructions to oversee the decolonization of the country—ideally, the devolution of power to an Indian government that would include the whole subcontinent —and wide freedom of action to end the British raj on whatever terms he deemed wisest. Mountbatten soon became convinced that the differences between the Muslim League and the Congress Party were irreconcilable in the near term, that speed was of the essence because of the real risks of mutiny among Indian troops or the outbreak of civil war, and that a partition was the only expedient option for independence. Mountbatten’s plan for the partition of India was announced on June 3, 1947.

Britain’s Parliament passed the Indian Independence Act on July 18, 1947. It ordered that the dominions of India and Pakistan be demarcated by midnight of August 14–15, 1947, and that the assets of the world’s largest empire—which had been integrated in countless ways for more than a century—be divided within a single month. Racing the deadline, the Boundary Commission , appointed by Mountbatten, worked desperately to partition Punjab and Bengal in such a way as to leave the maximum practical number of Muslims to the west of the former’s new boundary and to the east of the latter’s. It consisted of four members from the Congress Party and four from the Muslim League and was chaired by Cyril Radcliffe—who had never before been to India. With little agreement between the parties and the deadline looming, Radcliffe made the final determination of the borders, which satisfied no one and infuriated everyone.

Dividing Punjab and Bengal, the provinces with a slim Muslim majority, caused tremendous problems, as the demographic distributions of those regions were heterogeneous and diverse . The new borders ran through the middle of villages, towns, fields, and more. When Pakistan was created, East and West Pakistan were separated by about 1,000 miles (1,600 km).

The commission also effectively cut in half the large Sikh population in Punjab. The western half of the community reacted with great concern over potential Muslim rule: the Mughal emperors had persecuted the Sikh Gurus in the 17th century, and the legacy of that persecution remained deeply felt. Although the commission had placed Amritsar , the Sikhs’ most sacred city, under Indian dominion , many other important Sikh shrines and landed estates were set to become part of Pakistan. Some Sikhs of western Punjab tried initially to retain control over their estates by pushing out local Muslims, but their attempts were met with violent reprisals. Nearly the entirety of the Sikh community ultimately fled to areas that would become part of India.

The transfer of power was completed on August 14 in Pakistan and August 15 in India, held a day apart so that Lord Mountbatten could attend both ceremonies. With the birth of the two independent countries, the British raj formally came to an end on August 15, 1947.

The borders of the new countries were not published until August 17, two days after the end of British rule. This set the stage for an immediate escalation of communal violence in areas around the new borders. Many ordinary people did not understand what partition meant until they were in the middle of it, sometimes literally. If a border village was roughly evenly divided between Hindus and Muslims, one community could argue that the village rightly belonged to India or Pakistan by driving out or killing members of the other community.

As soon as the new borders were announced, roughly 15,000,000 Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs fled from their homes on one side of the newly demarcated borders to what they thought would be “shelter” on the other. Some people were able to take trains or buses from one country to another, but most were forced to flee on foot, joining refugee columns that stretched for miles. These columns were the target of frequent ambushes , as were the trains that carried refugees across the new borders. In the course of that tragic exodus of innocents, as many as 2,000,000 people were slaughtered in communal massacres (although scarce documentation left a wide range of estimates). Sikhs, settled astride Punjab’s new division, suffered the highest proportion of casualties relative to their numbers.

While the worst of the violence took place during the first six weeks of partition, the consequences of those weeks played out for decades. Even provinces that had initially escaped violence later saw outbreaks of conflict; for example, Sindh struggled to absorb large numbers of refugees ( muhajirs ) from India who, although Muslim, belonged to different ethnolinguistic groups from the local population. Disparities that arose from the hasty creation of Pakistan led ultimately to a devastating war in 1971 between its eastern and western provinces, which resulted in the independence of East Pakistan as Bangladesh . Territorial disputes between India and Pakistan, particularly the question of the Kashmir region, have also led to multiple wars. Moreover, tensions over the rights of Sikhs and the preservation of their communal integrity have also led to violent confrontations in India, most notably with the storming of the Harmandir Sahib in 1984 and the subsequent assassination of Indira Gandhi .

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The Partition of India: Causes, Tragedy, and Lasting Impact

• by history tools
• May 26, 2024

Introduction

The partition of India in 1947 was a defining moment of the 20th century that split the subcontinent along religious lines, creating the independent nations of Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan. The human toll was staggering, with up to 2 million dead and 14 million displaced in one of the largest mass migrations in history.

But why did partition, which occurred just as India was gaining hard-fought independence from nearly 200 years of British colonial rule, happen? The causes were complex and multifaceted, rooted in India‘s history, politics, and social fabric. This article explores the key factors that led to this tragic event and its enduring legacies that still shape the region today.

India Under the British Raj

To understand partition, we must first examine how British colonialism transformed India. The British East India Company began establishing coastal trading posts in the early 1600s. Through military conquests, annexations, and alliances with local rulers, the Company came to control nearly all of the Indian subcontinent by the 1850s.

In 1858, after a major uprising known as the Sepoy Mutiny, the British Crown took direct control. India became the "jewel in the crown" of the British Empire, a massive colony that supplied valuable raw materials and markets for British goods. However, colonial policies and attitudes also sowed divisions among India‘s diverse religious and ethnic groups.

The British employed a "divide and rule" strategy, pitting Hindus against Muslims to weaken the independence movement. They promoted the idea that Hindus and Muslims were two distinct nations that could not coexist. Many Muslims, who made up about 25% of the population, worried their interests would not be protected in a Hindu-dominated state.

"British colonial officials, scholars and missionaries postulated the irreconcilable differences between Muslims and Hindus, even though the two communities had co-habited in India for almost a millennium," writes historian Yasmin Khan in The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan.

Communal tensions frequently boiled over into riots and violence. The 1920s saw bloody clashes take hundreds of lives. The 1930s were even deadlier. In 1937, provincial elections under the Government of India Act exposed the growing chasm, with the Muslim League faring poorly and the Hindu-led Congress Party dominating.

The Pakistan Movement

It was against this backdrop that the All-India Muslim League, led by Muhammad Ali Jinnah, increasingly advocated for a separate Muslim homeland. Jinnah argued that Hindus and Muslims were not just separate religious communities, but distinct nations that could not live together.

"Jinnah used to the threat of Hindu domination as a bargaining chip to increase his party‘s power and to argue for minority safeguards," writes historian Vazira Zamindar of Brown University. "But by the 1940s, he had become convinced that an independent Muslim state, which he called Pakistan, was the only way to protect Muslim interests."

In 1940, the Muslim League formally embraced the "Pakistan Resolution," demanding autonomous states in Muslim-majority areas. Jinnah insisted this was nonnegotiable, declaring in 1945: "Pakistan is our demand and by God we will have it."

Many historians argue that Jinnah and the Pakistan Movement overplayed their hand. "The demand for Pakistan was a bargaining counter, which was then transformed into a non-negotiable principle," writes Indian historian Ramachandra Guha in India After Gandhi. "Once you insist on a maximalist demand, it is very difficult to abandon it and accept a compromise."

The British Role and Rush to Independence

As WWII battered Britain‘s resources and anti-colonial movements surged across the Empire, it became clear that British rule in India was unsustainable. In 1947, the British government, led by Prime Minister Clement Attlee, decided to expedite the transfer of power and partition the subcontinent.

Many historians see the partition decision as a cynical move by a war-weary Britain to cut its losses in India while maintaining some geopolitical influence through a divided subcontinent. Lord Louis Mountbatten, the last British viceroy, rushed the process despite being warned of the risks.

"The British were unwilling to commit enough soldiers to maintain order and were eager to rid themselves of the problem," writes historian William Dalrymple in The New Yorker. "A bloody partition would be better than a united, independent India…Britain was broke and the British wanted to get out fast."

With Hindu-Muslim tensions running high and communal violence breaking out, British officials believed partition, however messy, was the only way to prevent a full-scale civil war. The decision was made. Two lawyer-diplomats, Cyril Radcliffe and Christopher Beaumont, hastily drew the new borders, dividing Bengal and Punjab along ostensibly religious lines despite knowing little about Indian geography or demographics.

The Human Tragedy

As the June 1947 announcement of the partition plan sparked some of the deadliest riots yet, the countdown to the official "Independence Day" of August 15 was marred by horrific violence and ethnic cleansing along the new borders of India and Pakistan. Hindus and Sikhs fled the newly created Pakistan, while Muslims headed the other way.

Eyewitness accounts describe nightmarish scenes of unspeakable brutality – trains full of corpses arriving at stations, neighbors turning on neighbors, women raped and abducted, children killed in front of parents, villages and city quarters burned and looted.

While scholars still debate the full scale of the tragedy, it is clear that at least one million people, and perhaps up to two million, lost their lives in the chaos and communal slaughter surrounding partition. Between 10-20 million people were displaced across the new borders in the largest mass migration in history.

"There are numerous stories of women jumping into wells to save their honor, of men killing their own wives and daughters so they would not fall into the hands of the ‘enemy,‘" writes Urvashi Butalia, who collected oral histories from survivors in The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India. "Thousands of women were raped and abducted, forced to convert, forced into marriage, their bodies mutilated and disfigured."

The following data from The 1951 Census of Pakistan offers a glimpse of the staggering displacement and demographic shifts:

Legacy and Lasting Impact

The trauma and bitterness of partition continues to poison India-Pakistan relations 75 years later. The first of several bloody wars over the Muslim-majority state of Kashmir began shortly after independence in 1947. The dispute remains unresolved and a flashpoint for conflict.

Communal tensions and violence between Hindus and Muslims have flared up with distressing frequency, from the anti-Sikh pogroms following Prime Minister Indira Gandhi‘s assassination in 1984, to riots in Gujarat that killed over 1,000 in 2002, to mob lynchings and deadly clashes over cow protection and the Citizenship Amendment Act in recent years.

The partition also fueled the rise of religious nationalism in both countries, with profound impacts on their secular foundations and democratic institutions. In India, Hindu nationalist forces have grown powerful enough to claim the premiership. In Pakistan, the Muslim League‘s heirs have struggled to balance Islam and democracy.

"There is still unresolved resentment on either side of the border about partition," says Guha. "It strengthened religious fundamentalists on both sides…and it made the Kashmir issue intractable."

Scholars continue to study and debate the causes and impacts of partition, even as the last generation of survivors gradually fades away. What remains clear is that the scars and trauma continue to shape the subcontinent in profound ways.

"The political geography of partition may been forgotten over time," writes Vazira Zamindar. "But the human geography of partition is still alive in the memories of survivors, in the stories of families, and in the imaginations of later generations."

The partition of India in 1947 remains one of the most tragic events of the 20th century, a tale of political failure and hubris, communal hatred and unspeakable violence, and dreams of nationhood shattered and remade. Its legacy endures in the tensions and fault lines that still divide the subcontinent.

While the causes were complex, rooted in the history of colonialism, the rise of nationalism, and the communal politics of religion, perhaps the greatest lesson of partition is the fragility of diversity and pluralism in the face of politicized identity.

India‘s partition serves as a haunting reminder of the human consequences of division, and the very real dangers of pitting religious or ethnic communities against one another for political gain. As the subcontinent still grapples with the echoes of this painful history, it is more vital than ever to remember and strive for a future beyond partition.

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How the Partition of India happened – and why its effects are still felt today

Professor of History, Head of Department, Royal Holloway University of London

Disclosure statement

Sarah Ansari has previously received funding from the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) to explore the impact of Independence and Partition on life in India and Pakistan.

Royal Holloway provides funding as a member of The Conversation UK.

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“Partition” – the division of British India into the two separate states of India and Pakistan on August 14-15, 1947 – was the “last-minute” mechanism by which the British were able to secure agreement over how independence would take place . At the time, few people understood what Partition would entail or what its results would be, and the migration on the enormous scale that followed took the vast majority of contemporaries by surprise .

The main vehicle for nationalist activity was the Indian National Congress, whose best-known leaders included Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru . Even before the 1940s, it had long argued for a unitary state with a strong centre ; even though Congress was ostensibly secular in its objectives, organisations representing minority interests increasingly viewed this idea with suspicion, believing that it would entrench the political dominance of Hindus, who made up about 80% of the population.

At around 25% of its population, Muslims were British India’s largest religious minority. Under imperial rule, they had grown accustomed to having their minority status protected by a system of reserved legislative seats and separate electorates. The British system of political control hinged on identifying interest groups willing to collaborate, a governing style often described as “divide and rule”.

The prospect of losing this protection as independence drew closer worried more and more Muslims, first in parts of northern India, and then, after World War II, in the influential Muslim-majority provinces of Bengal and Punjab. In 1945-6, the All-India Muslim League , led by Muhammad Ali Jinnah , won a majority of Muslim votes in provincial elections. This strengthened the party’s claim to speak for a substantial proportion of, but never all, the subcontinent’s Muslims.

Then came World War II – and suddenly, the political stakes in India were considerably higher.

The end of the Raj

When Britain took India into the war without consultation in 1939, Congress opposed it; large nationalist protests ensued, culminating in the 1942 Quit India movement, a mass movement against British rule. For their part in it, Gandhi and Nehru and thousands of Congress workers were imprisoned until 1945.

Meanwhile, the British wartime need for local allies gave the Muslim League an opening to offer its cooperation in exchange for future political safeguards. In March 1940, the Muslim League’s “Pakistan” resolution called for the creation of “separate states” – plural, not singular – to accommodate Indian Muslims, whom it argued were a separate “nation”.

Historians are still divided on whether this rather vague demand was purely a bargaining counter or a firm objective. But while it may have been intended to solve the minority issue, it ended up aggravating it instead.

After the war, Attlee’s Labour government in London recognised that Britain’s devastated economy could not cope with the cost of the over-extended empire. A Cabinet Mission was dispatched to India in early 1946, and Attlee described its mission in ambitious terms:

My colleagues are going to India with the intention of using their utmost endeavours to help her to attain her freedom as speedily and fully as possible. What form of government is to replace the present regime is for India to decide; but our desire is to help her to set up forthwith the machinery for making that decision.

An act of parliament proposed June 1948 as the deadline for the transfer of power. But the Mission failed to secure agreement over its proposed constitutional scheme, which recommended a loose federation; the idea was rejected by both Congress and the Muslim League, which vowed to agitate for “Pakistan” by any means possible .

All the while, communal violence was escalating. In August 1946, the Great Calcutta Killing left some 4,000 people dead and a further 100,000 homeless.

By March 1947, a new viceroy, Lord Louis Mountbatten, arrived in Delhi with a mandate to find a speedy way of bringing the British Raj to an end . On June 3, he announced that independence would be brought forward to August that year, presenting politicians with an ultimatum that gave them little alternative but to agree to the creation of two separate states.

Pakistan – its eastern and western wings separated by around 1,700 kilometres of Indian territory – celebrated independence on August 14 that year; India did so the following day. The new borders, which split the key provinces of the Punjab and Bengal in two, were officially approved on August 17. They had been drawn up by a Boundary Commission, led by British lawyer Cyril Radcliffe , who later admitted that he had relied on out-of-date maps and census materials.

Partition triggered riots, mass casualties, and a colossal wave of migration. Millions of people moved to what they hoped would be safer territory, with Muslims heading towards Pakistan, and Hindus and Sikhs in the direction of India. As many as 14-16m people may have been eventually displaced, travelling on foot, in bullock carts and by train.

Estimates of the death toll post-Partition range from 200,000 to two million. Many were killed by members of other communities and sometimes their own families, as well as by the contagious diseases which swept through refugee camps . Women were often targeted as symbols of community honour, with up to 100,000 raped or abducted.

What can explain this intensely violent reaction? Many of the people concerned were very deeply attached not just to religious identity, but to territory, and Britain was reluctant to use its troops to maintain law and order. The situation was especially dangerous in Punjab, where weapons and demobilised soldiers were abundant.

Another unforeseen consequence of Partition was that Pakistan’s population ended up more religiously homogeneous than originally anticipated. The Muslim League’s leaders had assumed that Pakistan would contain a sizeable non-Muslim population, whose presence would safeguard the position of Muslims remaining in India – but in West Pakistan, non-Muslim minorities comprised only 1.6% of the population by 1951, compared with 22% in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh).

And even though Pakistan was ostensibly created as a “homeland” for India’s Muslim minority, not all Muslims even supported its formation, never mind migrated there: Muslims remained the largest minority group in independent India, making up around 10% of the population in 1951. Gandhi himself was assassinated in January 1948 by a Hindu nationalist extremist who blamed him for being too supportive of Muslims at the time of Partition.

Both states subsequently faced huge problems accommodating and rehabilitating post-Partition refugees, whose numbers swelled when the two states went to war over the disputed territory of Jammu and Kashmir in 1947-8. Later bouts of communal tension generated further movement, with a trickle of people still migrating as late as the 1960s.

Today, the two countries’ relationship is far from healthy. Kashmir remains a flashpoint ; both countries are nuclear-armed . Indian Muslims are frequently suspected of harbouring loyalties towards Pakistan; non-Muslim minorities in Pakistan are increasingly vulnerable thanks to the so-called Islamisation of life there since the 1980s. Seven decades on, well over a billion people still live in the shadow of Partition.

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A recent escalation in tensions between India and Pakistan has put a spotlight on the violent history of the two countries’ independence that Stanford scholar Priya Satia says continues to haunt the Indian subcontinent to this day.

Historian Priya Satia has studied the partition of India as part of her work. Her current research examines the work of poets who wrote about partition and its aftermath. (Image credit: Steve Castillo)

The two nations have co-existed uneasily since the 1947 partition of India, which ended almost two centuries of British rule in the region and led to the largest mass migration in human history. The partition created the independent nations of Muslim-majority Pakistan and Hindu-majority India, separating the provinces of Bengal and Punjab along religious lines, despite the fact that Muslims and Hindus lived in mixed communities throughout the area, Satia said. Although the agreement required no relocation, about 15 million people moved or were forced to move, and between half a million to 2 million died in the ensuing violence.

Satia, a professor of British history in the School of Humanities and Sciences, has studied the partition as part of her work, focusing on the personal stories of its victims. Her current project examines the work of poets who wrote about partition and its aftermath.

A daughter of immigrants shaped by the event, Satia explains how this historical event unfolded and its continuing effects today.

Why did the 1947 partition of India unfold the way it did?

The context of World War II and the transfer of power were critical in shaping the violence. During the war, the British jailed much of the Congress Party in India. In the meantime, more violently inclined nationalist movements flourished, some bearing an imprint of fascism. Indians who fought in the war came home with violent experiences. They and their arms were recruited into new defense groups and paramilitary volunteer bodies attached to these violent movements, such as the RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh) and the Muslim League National Guard. Some Indian politicians in provincial governments began to use such groups for policing as they shifted from being the opposition to being the government.

Meanwhile, having secured their aim of having both newly independent countries in the Commonwealth, British officials hurried events at every turn. The hasty dismantling of the imperial state not only made it harder to address the violence, it also made much of the violence possible in the first place. The imperial state shed its law and order capacity and sense of responsibility, offering little support to administrators trying to deal with routine local politics. The British Army began to depart just when India’s own army was being divided and could not be relied on to control violence. In Punjab, confidential instructions insisted that British army units had no operational functions except in emergency to save British lives. Bureaucracies became dysfunctional as officers thought of migrating or tried to please new masters or gave into anxiety themselves. Officials were openly partisan or not at their posts. The evident breakdown of law and order produced paranoia and fear in everyday life. Whatever religious justifications may have been at play in the violence, many actions emerged from a sense of desperate need for survival in a harrowing environment.

All the ingredients for ethnic cleansing were there: a feeble, polarized police force, absence of troops and an armed and terrified population. The violence marked the crumbling of an old order and abdication of responsibility for minorities by all those with any kind of power.

You have studied the partition for many years. What are some key takeaways from your research?

First, high-level negotiations between political elites do not shed much light on why partition unfolded the way it did, involving the flight and death of millions. Stanford Libraries have partnered with the 1947 Partition Archive, an organization collecting oral histories that can finally help us understand that history.

Second, the idea of Pakistan emerged initially out of an imaginative effort to think outside the box of nationalism after World War I’s demonstration of the violence nationalism caused. It was a way of imagining a polity anchored by something other than nationality or ethnicity.

Third, the idea of partition was on the table in the first place because the British had applied it already in the process of decolonizing Ireland and were discussing using it in Palestine. They thought of it as an acceptable compromise for ensuring all territory wound up within the British Commonwealth after devolution, even if in fragments, so that they might maintain old imperial ties in some form after the granting of formal independence.

Fourth, the history of partition haunts the subcontinent, just like in Ireland, where Brexit has made the separation between Ireland and Northern Ireland a live issue all over again. It did not solve any problem it purported to solve between different communities.

Your research has focused on the personal stories of people living through the partition, and your own family was affected by the event. What was it like to live through that turbulent time?

It was deeply scarring and traumatic, changing their lives dramatically, uprooting them from places and communities where they had lived for generations. They lost languages, ways of life, property, heirlooms, people. It shaped their attitudes toward government, minorities and the concept of home.

Trauma like this has lasting consequences – it affects what is shared with and what is concealed from future generations. Habits formed through trauma are also passed on – I was not there but still many of my habits have been shaped by my mother’s and grandmother’s experiences after 1947.

Some of your research has also analyzed the work of poets who wrote about the partition. How did poetry help shape the meaning of what happened?

Poetry helped people express other ways of being that continued to resist the national identities of “Indian” and “Pakistani.” It helped express the still-open possibilities for the relationship between India and Pakistan – it was not clear that the border would be hard and impassable, and that relations would be wholly inimical until the 1965 war.

What could be learned from this history?

Partition is not a solution for allegedly intractable conflict between communities.

Media Contacts

Alex Shashkevich, Stanford News Service: (650) 497-4419, [email protected]

• HISTORY & CULTURE

Why the Partition of India and Pakistan still casts a long shadow over the region

The end of British colonial rule birthed two sovereign nations—but hastily drawn borders caused simmering tensions to boil over. 75 years later, memories of Partition still haunt survivors.

On the night of August 13, 1947, 13-year-old Suri Sehgal was so excited he couldn’t sleep. The next day, he’d watch the lowering of the British flag and the raising of a new one in his native Punjab province. Once part of India, his town would now become part of a new nation called Pakistan. The newly demarcated country of India would become a self-governing state a day later.

Sehgal remembers the Lalamusa train station where the Pakistani flag ceremony took place, the optimistic mood, and the special meal he shared with family and friends. “We all celebrated together,” he recalled in a 2016 oral history with the 1947 Partition Archive . “It was wonderful.”

But within hours, the long-awaited transition of power—and the partition of India into two nations, majority-Hindu India and majority-Muslim Pakistan—had become a nightmare as simmering secular tensions, stoked by divisive colonial rule, boiled over. That evening, Sehgal watched in horror as hundreds of people carrying knives and other weapons ran past, on the hunt for Hindus to attack.

Days later, Sehgal’s father, worried about the safety of his half-Hindu children, pushed them onto a sweltering, packed, moving train at the same station where they had celebrated Pakistani independence. As the refugee train made its slow way southward into India, its exhausted occupants were confronted with piles of dead bodies being eaten by vultures alongside the tracks.

Sehgal was one of millions of Indians and Pakistanis whose lives were disrupted—or ended—during what is now known as Partition. On its surface, the August 1947 creation of two self-governing nations was a victory for those who longed for self-determination. (It would be another several decades, however, before people who lived in what is now Bangladesh would gain that right.) But simmering secular tensions and a severely mismanaged transition turned Britain’s historic exit from the colony into a bloodbath.

The colonial roots of Partition

Partition’s roots date back to the 17th century, when the British East India Company , a private company that traded in Indian riches like spices and silks, began acquiring Indian land, taking over local governments, and making laws that flew in the face of longstanding cultural traditions. ( How the British East India Company became the world’s most powerful business .)

In 1857, Indian soldiers mutinied —prompting the British government to dissolve the company and take over India. The newly established British Raj appointed officials—many of whom had never set foot in India before—to keep its colony in line. Those privileged British administrators and their families lived in wealth and luxury, while most Indians lived in poverty.

As Britain drained India of its wealth and profited from its natural resources, it subdivided 60 percent of the nation into provinces and recognized a patchwork of hundreds of pre-existing "princely states," autonomous entities overseen by local rulers.

To preserve its dominance, the British Raj deliberately emphasized differences between religious and ethnic communities. As geographer A.J. Christopher explains , colonial administrators used traits like religion and skin color to segregate and isolate their subjects. They eventually established a limited political role for Indians—but the process for getting those positions often pitted Hindus and Muslims against one another.

Lord Curzon, the British viceroy to India, further fueled these divisions in 1905 when he split India’s largest province, Bengal, into two: one majority Muslim, the other majority Hindu. A staunch colonialist who believed Indians were inferior, Curzon faced sharp resistance to this attempt to “divide and rule .” But though the split only lasted until 1911, it galvanized a growing independence movement within the Indian National Congress, a political party that had been formed by educated elites to negotiate with the British Raj. It also spurred the formation of the Muslim League, a political party agitating for Muslim rights within India.

The fight for an independent India

In the early 20th century, attorney and politician Mohandas “Mahatma” Gandhi was elected to the Indian National Congress and began pushing for independence from Britain through non-violent civil disobedience. But boycotts, demonstrations and marches met with brutality and legal crackdowns. ( How Mahatma Gandhi changed political protest .)

British officials attempted to appease the nationalists, enfranchising more people and increasing their representation in local government. These reforms only benefited a small group of Indians: By 1935, only 12 percent of citizens could vote .  

Then, the United Kingdom entered the Second World War—and took India with it. Forced to defend their colonizers’ interests with their own blood, many Indians opposed the war. To shore up support, the British government offered India status as a British-owned dominion that could govern itself with British oversight. But the Indian National Congress rejected the plan. In 1942, Gandhi launched “Quit India,” a campaign of widespread civil disobedience demanding immediate independence. Britain responded by arresting Gandhi and other leaders and outlawing the Indian National Congress.

The move backfired: The crackdown galvanized many who had not supported independence in the past. Widespread riots and mass detentions followed. “Quit India” had been suppressed. But it—and the mistrust sown during a catastrophic famine in Bengal that killed millions in 1943—convinced British leaders that India’s future as an obedient colony was doomed.

Clashing visions for an independent India

Though independence began to appear within India’s grasp, divisions between the Indian National Congress and the Muslim League deepened.

Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, another National Congress leader, had long believed an independent India should be a single, unified nation. But though the Muslim League also supported home rule, its leader Muhammad Ali Jinnah publicly abandoned the cause of a unified India in 1940.

Though the Indian National Congress billed itself as a party for all Indians, members of the Muslim League were concerned it only represented Hindu interests. A united India, Jinnah argued, would give Hindus control of the Muslim minority. Instead, the party demanded autonomy through the creation of a nation called Pakistan.

Matters became even more fraught when, in 1946, talks between the two groups fell apart and Jinnah called for a “direct action day” of Muslim protest. “We will either have a divided India or a destroyed India,” he said.

The call resulted in catastrophe. On August 16, 1946, Muslim-Hindu riots erupted in Calcutta, the capital of Bengal province. “The air was electric,” wrote a military official in a report. “The result of this riot has been complete mistrust between the communities.” An estimated 4,000 were killed and 10,000 injured in the conflict, and 100,000 were left homeless.

Britain oversees a hasty partition

As India teetered on the brink of civil war, Britain’s interest in maintaining its waning control evaporated. Facing international pressure to withdraw, George VI sent his cousin, Lord Louis Mountbatten, to India in March 1947 to manage Britain’s retreat. ( How the Commonwealth arose from a crumbling British Empire .)

Mountbatten convinced leaders to agree to the creation of two new states, Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan. But though he was given a year to complete his task, he rushed the schedule—giving Cyril Radcliffe, a British lawyer who had never set foot in India, just five weeks to divide the country in two and demarcate the new nations’ borders.

Princely states could decide which nation they wanted to join, and Radcliffe and his team were otherwise told to draw boundaries that respected religious majorities and prioritized contiguous borders. The “Radcliffe Line” was easy to draw in areas with a distinct majority, but Radcliffe soon found that the religious groups were dispersed throughout India. In areas like Bengal and Punjab, which had near-equal Hindu and Muslim populations, drawing a line proved particularly difficult.

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In the end, Radcliffe and his team—none of whom had expertise in mapmaking or Indian politics and culture—split both provinces in two and awarded roughly half to each new nation. This meant the new country of Pakistan would not be a contiguous nation: Most of its land mass lay in the northwestern corner of India, with a chunk called East Pakistan that lay in Bengal in the west.

The decision was fateful: It stranded hundreds of thousands of Hindus and Muslims in the “wrong” new nation and separated Bengal from the rest of Pakistan by a thousand miles.  

On August 14 and 15, 1947, Pakistan and India became dominions of the British crown—with the understanding they would ultimately become fully independent. But Mountbatten refused to issue the maps until two days later in an attempt to keep the international focus on Britain’s benevolence.

Partition’s bloody aftermath

What Britain cast as a triumph was actually the beginning of the largest human migration in history and one of humanity’s most brutal episodes. Uncertain about where the borders had been drawn—and which country they currently lived in—as many as 18 million people packed up their belongings and set out to reach the “right” country.

The ensuing confusion and fear was like tinder for longstanding Hindu-Muslim tensions. After years of increasingly polarized rhetoric, old grudges became deadly, and new animosity broke out among those whose minority and majority statuses had suddenly switched. Assailants abducted and raped tens of thousands of women; people butchered members of their own families. Mobs attacked refugees and villagers, set buildings on fire, looted homes and businesses, and committed mass murder.

The violence was especially dire in Punjab and Bengal. In Punjab, ex-soldiers who had fought in World War II used their weapons on behalf of local elites who, writes historian Mytheli Sreenivas, “used the chaos of partition to settle old scores, assert claims over land, and secure their own political and economic power.” Though the countries were technically its dominions, Britain did not quell the violence.

The legacy of Partition

By the time the violence faded around 1950, between one and two million people had died and both nations were forever transformed. In 1948, Gandhi was assassinated by a Hindu nationalist who reportedly thought the leader was too pro-Muslim.  

( The roots of the Kashmir conflict can be traced back to Partition .)

Meanwhile, Pakistan’s unusual geography had seeded tensions between east and west that would ultimately lead to a push for Bangladeshi independence. Home to 56 percent of Pakistan’s population, East Pakistan received less funding and had less political power than its western counterpart. In 1971, after decades of discord, Bangladesh declared independence. Pakistan launched a military campaign to subdue the population, slaughtering at least 300,000 civilians; Bengali authorities claim the toll was 10 times higher, citing three million killed in a genocide . A bloody , eight-month war ensued, and Bangladesh officially became an independent, secular democracy in 1972.

In the 75 years since Partition, territorial disputes between India and Pakistan have continued to simmer, erupting into four wars and ongoing cross-border attacks. And Partition is still raw for many of those who experienced it firsthand, like Suri Sehgal. Although his entire family survived, reuniting in India at the end of 1947, others were not so lucky. For many in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, the losses and memories of those bloody, uncertain days are still haunting.

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Revisiting India's partition : new essays on memory, culture, and politics

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The Story of the 1947 Partition as Told by the People Who Were There

American India Foundation’s Clinton Fellow Manleen Sandhu records an oral history interview in Sultanpur Lodhi, Punjab, India, with Amarnath Kaustabh, a witness of the 1947 Partition. 

— The 1947 Partition Archive 

Few Americans know the story of modern India and Pakistan’s chaotic birth in 1947, or the Partition, as it is known, when British forces hurriedly retreated from South Asia. More than 14 million people were uprooted from their ancestral homes and an estimated 3 million perished due to violence, hunger, suicide, and disease. The history books I read in my Florida high school spoke about Mahatma Gandhi’s peaceful marches as a means to independence in South Asia, but never mentioned the bloodletting and the unprecedented refugee crisis caused by the retreat of an empire bankrupted by World War II.  

By 1947, about half of South Asia was ruled by the British Crown as “British India,” surrounded by more than 500 indigenous and autonomous kingdoms, many of which maintained a protectorate agreement with the British Empire. As the British departed in the summer of 1947, unable to financially sustain their colonies following the war, the South Asian kingdoms were consolidated with British Indian territories, sometimes by military force, to form two new countries: the Republic of India and the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. Sir Cyril Radcliffe, a British barrister, was commissioned to divide the regions of Punjab and Bengal, based on religious majorities: Muslim-dominant areas went to Pakistan and Sikh/Hindu-dominant areas went to India. Unable to quell the independence movement and growing sectarian violence, the British accelerated the transfer of power to less than six months, leading to a complete breakdown in society. The sudden transition from an imperial colony to a democracy led to mass violence as locals vying for power sought to “cleanse” their newly acquired constituencies, supported by far-right religious groups whose agendas were eerily similar to early twentieth-century nationalists in Europe. Gangs of young men eyed an opportunity for economic gain during the chaos, participating in organized looting and using religion as an excuse to target vulnerable, newly minted “minority” groups whose ancestral lands were now on the wrong side of a border. 

Partition led to an unprecedented mass migration and refugee crisis. Despite the scale of the upheaval and continued repercussions of Partition, it was a forgotten history six decades later in 2010 when we began our work of building the 1947 Partition Archive, a crowdsourced oral history repository that preserves more than 10,300 survivor interviews from around the world. I was motivated to bridge the gap between official histories and the folk histories we heard in our families. My own grandparents’ story of migration from Lahore to Amritsar (and then Delhi) seemed unfair and unnecessary. They, and millions of others, were uprooted from their homelands because of miscalculated decisions by a few leaders. “The only solace we had was that we were in this together,” one interviewee recalled. 

Muslim refugees crowd a train heading to Pakistan from India on September 26, 1947, about six weeks after the official separation of the countries. 

— Associated Press   

The oral histories are challenging commonly held perceptions of Partition history and our global memory of colonialism in surprising ways. The stories reveal how the transition of power in 1947 was haphazard on multiple levels. One witness from Larkana in the Sindh Province remembered, “A British officer who was summoned to leave his post quickly picked out my father and handed over his prestigious civil services position.” 

Other stories poignantly capture the psychological scars of Partition: Ali Shan, now a happy grandfather who enjoys spending his Sundays leading hikes in the San Francisco Bay Area, was orphaned in 1947. He watched a mob murder his family and became the sole survivor of the attack. He lived in refugee camps all alone as an eight-year-old boy and described his emotional journey of overcoming trauma by forgiving his family’s murderers. When he shared his story with our volunteers, it was the first time he had told it, as the memory was too difficult for him to recall for family and friends. 

When we began this work in 2010, the last generation of Partition witnesses were aging, and time was running out to capture their memories. We devised a crowdsourcing protocol to collaborate with the public in documenting oral histories. New digital tools, such as emerging cloud-computing technologies and social media features, enabled fast and frugal documentation from across the globe. We began posting unedited images of elders being interviewed in villages and towns across the world, inspiring thousands to join us. The process accelerated with the proliferation of smartphones with video capacity.   

By 2016, the 1947 Partition Archive Facebook page had ballooned to one million followers, who were interacting with our oral history posts more than ten million times a year. Today, more than 7,000 individuals have trained at our free online oral history workshops held biweekly since 2012. They have gone on to help preserve more than 10,000 oral histories of Partition witnesses. Makers of several films, including blockbuster Bollywood numbers such as Bharat and Bhaag Milkha Bhaag , as well as the BBC documentary My Family, Partition and Me , have consulted the 1947 Partition Archive’s public content and oral history collections. Exhibits such as “Stories in the Metro,” held in Delhi’s popular Mandi House Metro station for two years, introduced memories of Partition witnesses to more than half a million riders per day. Meanwhile, exhibits such as “Refugees of the British Empire,” supported by California Humanities and held at the archive’s Berkeley location, exposed the local public to this tragic chapter in world history. An ongoing collaboration with Stanford University Libraries will make the collection accessible to scholars via online streaming. 

At “Refugees of the British Empire,” audiences were introduced to the lesser-known South Asian battlefields of World War II through an unforgettable story: California resident and triple refugee Hardeep Singh, as he is called for privacy, narrated his family’s great escape on foot when Rangoon (Burma, British India) was bombed by the Japanese Army in December 1941. Singh’s family walked for more than a month through thick jungles in long lines formed by thousands of families on the same journey. “I was just a child, but I remember details vividly. . . . Many perished along the way,” he noted in Punjabi. Singh’s family members, like the others, were considered foreigners in Rangoon, hailing from the western reaches of British India. They traveled nearly 2,000 miles to safety in their ancestral village in West Punjab. However, it wasn’t long before unrest reached their doorstep again in 1947. They were driven out by violent mobs and had to flee with only a moment’s notice. Once again, they joined long caravans of people walking, making their way east to the regions that would become India. They walked for more than a month. Similar caravans traveled in the opposite direction. As for Singh, following another episode of sectarian violence in Punjab in 1984, he fled with his family, finding refuge in the United States. 

“It can happen here also,” Singh noted at the end of his interview, referring to the possibility of communal violence, leaving us to ponder lessons the world hasn’t yet learned from the 1947 Partition. Selective memories of the 1947 trauma overshadow memories of peaceful and uneventful coexistence before Partition. Oral histories give equal weight and context to both kinds of memories, providing an opportunity for critical reflections that challenge popular assumptions at the core of modern social conflicts. The archive is one way to reconcile the gap between folk histories and official histories, so that we may truly heal our historical wounds. 

Guneeta Singh Bhalla is the founder and executive director of the 1947 Partition Archive. 

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The text of this article is available for unedited republication, free of charge, using the following credit: “Originally published as “Oral Histories Detail the Chaos of Partition” in the Summer 2022 issue of  Humanities  magazine, a publication of the National Endowment for the Humanities.” Please notify us at  [email protected]  if you are republishing it or have any questions.

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Why the Partition of India and Pakistan led to decades of hurt

The border, hastily drawn along religious lines 74 years ago, makes muslims and hindus resentful neighbours.

IN THE DEPTH of a mid-August night in 1947, both India and Pakistan won freedom after two centuries of British rule. Yet while Pakistan celebrates independence on August 14th, India does so on the 15th. The difference is petty but telling. As much as the date marks a triumph shared between the neighbours it also marks a tragedy: Partition .

The British Raj is not remembered fondly on the Indian subcontinent, with the exception of one achievement. By hook or crook Britain did unite more of historic India, the land between the Himalayas and Indian Ocean, under a single flag than any previous ruler. As two world wars and rising nationalism shook this imperial construct, those struggling for independence assumed that the India they would inherit should include the whole territory.

This was not to be. Britain tried to appease its increasingly restive subjects with small doses of democracy, but this stoked tension. The quarter of Indians who were Muslim feared being perpetually outvoted by Hindu majorities. Some Muslim leaders broke with the wider independence movement, arguing that Muslims made up a separate nation and deserved a state of their own. This view gained traction during and after the second world war when Indians suffered multiple hardships, including inflation, famine and communal riots. As war-weakened Britain realised it could not hold onto its Raj, some in London suggested that splitting India on religious lines might prevent wider violence, and at the same time create a compliant new buffer state against the Soviet Union. In the end Britain decided to speed its exit, drawing a hasty line to demarcate Pakistan, a new state joining two Muslim-majority areas that were 2000kms apart (see map). Indians who opposed this partition, among them many Muslims were faced with a fait accompli.

Although Pakistan did indeed join the anti-Soviet camp in the Cold War, its creation did not forestall violence. As many as 2m people of all faiths died, and as many as 15m lost their homes during the chaotic exchange of people that accompanied its birth. Partition left pockets of disputed territory such as Kashmir , a Muslim-majority region whose Hindu ruler opted to join India rather than Pakistan. The two states have clashed repeatedly over Kashmir, which remains one of the world’s most heavily militarised regions. The terrible violence that accompanied the birth of Bangladesh in 1971 was also a legacy of Partition, as the Bengali Muslims of “East Pakistan” revolted against the culturally alien Muslims of West Pakistan.

At the time of Partition, few imagined that India and Pakistan would be enemies , or that the minorities living in each would be insecure. Muhammad Ali Jinnah, Pakistan’s founding father, spoke of retiring to his house in the Indian city of Bombay (now Mumbai). Alas, the logic of Partition—the defining of nations by religious identity alone—has emboldened those who cling most strongly to that identity at the expense of everyone else. Plotting Pakistani generals, rabble-rousing Indian politicians and religious extremists on both sides have made careers from stirring animosity. Pakistan and India now point nuclear weapons at each other, periodically exchange artillery fire and shadow box using spies, diplomats and, sometimes, by sponsoring terror attacks such as a suicide bombing that killed 40 Indian soldiers in Kashmir in 2019. Despite all that Bangladeshis, Indians and Pakistanis share—an immensely long history as well as languages and customs and tastes—they remain wary and resentful neighbours.

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Interview: Nisid Hajari on the Partition of India and the Lasting India-Pakistan Rivalry

In this email interview, Nisid Hajari , author of the new book Midnight’s Furies: The Deadly Legacy of India's Partition  and Asia Editor for Bloomberg View, reflects on the origins of India’s partition and how the violence of 1947 continues to influence India-Pakistan relations today. On June 16, Hajari appears at Asia Society New York for a conversation with journalist Fareed Zakaria and former Ambassador of Pakistan to the United States Husain Haqqani . The event is sold out, but available as a free live webcast at AsiaSociety.org/Live .

In Midnight’s Furies , you take a balanced approach and implicate all the parties involved in partition, from Jawaharlal Nehru to Mohammad Ali Jinnah to the British. Do you think it is possible to change the conventional wisdom about partition in India and Pakistan where people automatically blame the other side or the British, or are these narratives about partition too strongly embedded in the popular imagination in both countries?

I’m a long-term optimist about these things. It’s very easy for the debate to be overwhelmed by the loudest, most jingoistic voices on both sides of the border — no less so in India or Pakistan than in the U.S. Yet I think it’s also pretty clear that majorities in each country have generally warm feelings toward ordinary citizens in the other, even if they take issue with particular policies or elements of their respective governments. The idea that one side or the other can be wholly or even predominantly blamed for such a massive, uncontrolled conflagration as occurred in 1947 is on its face implausible: No political leader on either side was so ruthless as to have wished such suffering upon so many people, and none were so saintly as to have been blameless either. If one starts from that point, I think it becomes much easier to accept that there might be elements of truth not just to the narrative one grew up hearing, but to the one being told in the opposite country.

The book paints a fascinating picture of the personal rivalry between Jawaharlal Nehru and Mohammad Ali Jinnah, who, in their inability to work together, partly set the wheels in motion for partition and the ongoing India-Pakistan rivalry. How should we reevaluate them and their legacies given the roles they played with regard to partition?

As Nehru himself said (I’m paraphrasing here), both he and Jinnah were swept up in great events, but they were only men — with all the flaws and foibles one would expect. On the one hand, it’s obviously too easy to blame individual politicians, however charismatic or powerful, for all of the devastation of partition. But what I hope the book shows is that even leaders with the best of intentions and least prejudices can produce terrible outcomes if they’re not careful and if they lack self-awareness. Both men overestimated their sway over their followers, never imagining that the latter would commit the kind of atrocities that were unleashed at independence. And they miscalculated the impact of their own rhetoric, which might have sounded grand and persuasive in a courtroom or at a political rally, but which inspired some fairly brutal behavior out in villages and towns along the new border. That should be a caution to any leaders today who believe they can exploit the passions of their citizens for political gain — such demagoguery is not easily controlled.

The India-Pakistan rivalry and the violence of partition itself are sometimes incorrectly attributed to religious hatred between Hindus and Muslims. As your book shows, however, the Sikh community in the Punjab included some of the primary perpetrators and victims of partition violence. What role do you see for Punjabis on the two sides of the border in helping mend relations between the two countries today?

It’s easy to be sentimental about relations between the three communities in the Punjab before partition. But the fact remains that for decades, they did achieve a political accommodation whereby their political representatives focused more on issues where they shared interests — everything from agricultural prices to military pensions — than where they differed. I think it’s not inconceivable to rediscover such a focus. Indeed, just over a year ago when Narendra Modi was about to take power in India, there was a sense that the Punjab could lead the way toward closer relations between the two countries by expanding trade, infrastructure and energy links across the border. Although these communities were the most traumatized by partition, they also would stand to benefit most from closer economic ties. The hope has to be that as such linkages expand, you’ll start to develop communities on both side of the border who have more of an investment in peace and closer relations than they do in conflict and perpetual tension.

In the aftermath of the Peshawar school attack and a series of grisly terrorist incidents in Pakistan in recent years, do you think there has been any change in the mindset of the Pakistani military and government on the policy of using militant proxies and fostering religious extremism, especially as it applies to Pakistan’s support of militants that target India?

That’s the $64,000 question, of course. Top Pakistani generals and political leaders have very clearly stated that they’ll no longer distinguish between so-called good Taliban and bad Taliban, and they do seem genuinely irked by the fact that the Afghan Taliban have rejected calls to return to the negotiating table, instead launching one of the most vicious spring offensives in years in Afghanistan. That said, a Pakistani court did recently allow the alleged mastermind behind the 2008 terror attacks in Mumbai to walk free on bail, and there’s no evidence that the military has cut off ties to anti-India proxy groups like Lashkar-e-Taiba. Until the larger relationship between the two countries is put on a healthier footing, it’s hard to see the Pakistani security establishment completely renouncing the strategy of employing proxies against India. Reversing the policy would risk sparking a backlash that would be difficult to control, particularly while the army is preoccupied with battling Pakistani Taliban militants. Yet for Pakistan’s own security and stability, that step needs to be taken sooner rather than later.

In your opinion, what is needed to catalyze a process of gradual rapprochement between India and Pakistan?

As mentioned above, I think the key is to increase trade and infrastructure links between the two countries — to deepen their interdependence. This is hardly a panacea, of course, and won’t result in an immediate transformation of the relationship. But it might at least ease tensions to the point where a broader political solution, particularly to the issue of Kashmir, might become conceivable again. If reports are to be believed, the two sides came very close to such a deal several years ago, when Gen. Pervez Musharraf was leading Pakistan, and the general outlines of a solution have been visible for quite a while. What’s needed is a dose of realism and political courage on both sides of the border, as well as some momentum from below for better relations. The more ordinary citizens can see the concrete benefits of closer ties, the more likely they’ll be to push for or at least to accept compromises that might once have seemed unthinkable.

Watch the complete program:

Related Links

• Read an excerpt from Midnight’s Furies
• Listen to Nisid Hajari’s interview with Fresh Air’s Terry Gross on NPR
• Read Nisid Hajari’s essay on India-Pakistan relations in Foreign Policy

About the Author

Anubhav Gupta is Associate Director for the Asia Society Policy Institute. He is based in New York.

Cultural India

Partition of india.

The Partition of India was the division of the Presidencies and Provinces of British India conceived under the two-nation theory that resulted in formation of two independent dominions, India and Pakistan, in the British Commonwealth of Nations. The Indian Independence Act 1947 partitioned British India bringing an end of the British Raj. At midnight of 14–15 August 1947, India and Pakistan emerged legally as two self-governing countries. Based on Hindu and Muslim majorities three provinces namely Bengal, Assam and Punjab were divided that led to displacement of more than 14 million people paving way for an insurmountable refugee crisis, mass-scale violence, killings and disruption over religious lines. The Dominion of India was transformed into the Republic of India in 1950 while the Dominion of Pakistan that was administratively divided into West Pakistan and East Pakistan became the Islamic Republic of Pakistan in 1956. East Pakistan later seceded from the union in 1971 to become Bangladesh.

Circumstances & Events Leading to Partition of India

Partition of Bengal

The then Viceroy of India, Lord Curzon asked Queen Victoria to separate Bengal. Although there was no doubt that with a population of 70 million, administering Bengal was gradually becoming difficult, however with the real objective behind such division was political as the British feared a war if the Bengali Hindus and Muslims join hands. As the Indian independence movement was gaining momentum, the British wanted to weaken Bengal which was considered the nerve centre of Indian nationalism. Curzon announced the decision of dividing Bengal on July 19, 1905. Accordingly the Bengal Presidency, the largest administrative subdivision of British India, was divided on October 16, that year into largely Hindu western areas of Bengal that presently form the Indian states of West Bengal, Odisha, Bihar and Jharkhand; and the largely Muslim eastern areas of East Bengal and Assam. By dividing Bengal in this manner, the British not only thrived in restraining the Bengali influence in India’s freedom struggle but also reduced the Bengalis into a minority in the Hindu western areas of Bengal with around 37 million Oriya and Hindi speaking people compared to 17 million Bengalis.

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The partition was not taken well by both the elites as well as the large middle-class from the Hindu Bengali community who recognised it as a “divide and rule” policy. Spontaneous and sporadic protests across Bengal followed. The protests took shape of Swadesi (“buy Indian”) movement. People boycotted British products, leaders of the anti-partition movement resolved to use Indian goods, foreign goods shops were picketed, western products including clothes were thrown on bonfires and imported sugar was also boycotted. The anti-partition movement leaders used the title of a Bengali poem written by Bankim Chandra Chatterjee ‘Vande Mataram’ meaning “I praise thee, Mother” as their slogan. A song was composed from the poem by Rabindranath Tagore. The Congress Working Committee later (in October 1937) adopted the first two verses of the song as the National Song of India. Public buildings were bombed, armed robberies were staged and British officials were murdered by group of young men. Soon the slogan and the revolts garnered nationwide attention.

The Muslim elites on the other hand met the new viceroy, Lord Minto in 1906 and asked for separate electorates for Muslims as also proportional legislative representation for them. They founded the All Indian Muslim League political party in December 1906 conference in Dhaka that was hosted by Nawab Sir Khwaja Salimullah and held at Ahsan Manzil, the official residence of the Dhaka Nawab Family. Lord Hardinge later re-united the two parts of Bengal on December 12, 1911, in face of political protests as well as to appease the sentiment of the Bengalis.

Role of British Indian Army during First World War, Lucknow Pact & The Government of India Act of 1919

Contribution of the British Indian Army during the First World War (July 28, 1914 – November 11, 1918) was immense which included involvement of huge number of independent brigades and divisions in major military activity areas in Europe, the Mediterranean and in the Middle East. News of participation of Indian troops in the war including death of thousands of Indian soldiers reached across the globe through newsprint and radio garnering worldwide rise in the international profile of India. In 1920, India became one of the founding members of League of Nations, the principal mission of which was to maintain world peace. India also took part in the 1920 Summer Olympics in Antwerp under the name, “Les Indes Anglaises” (British India). The Indian leaders were increasingly pressing for constitutional reforms in India since the late 19th century. They demanded a greater role in the government in India. After the Indian Army contribution during the First World War, the conservative British political leaders also started acknowledging the need of constitutional change so that participation of Indians in the government of the British Indian Empire can be increased.

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Meanwhile a joint session was held by the Muslim League and Congress in December 1916 in Lucknow where an agreement famously known as the Lucknow Pact was reached. In pursuit of demanding Indian autonomy, the two parties agreed to permit proportionately higher representation of religious minorities in the provincial legislatures through the pact. The pact was considered a significant milestone in the Indian Independence movement as it established cordial relations between the Indian National Congress and the Muslim League and ignited a ray of hope for Hindu Muslim unity.

In pursuit of expanding participation of Indians in the government of India, the Government of India Act, 1919 was passed which received Royal Assent on December 23 that year. Also famous as the Montagu–Chelmsford Reforms, the Act consisted of reforms advised in the report of the Viceroy, Lord Chemlsford and the Secretary of State for India, Edwin Montagu. It introduced a diarchy for the major provinces where control of some areas of government, included in the “transferred list” like agriculture, education, health and supervision of local government, in each such province would be controlled by Government of ministers who would be accountable to the Provincial Council. A ‘’reserved list’’ including other areas of government like foreign affairs, defence (the military) and communications would be controlled by the Viceroy. The Act also made admission of Indians into the civil service as well as in the army officer corps easier and reserved seats in both provincial and imperial legislative councils for domiciled Europeans, Anglo-Indians, Indian Christians, Muslims and Sikhs reaffirming the principle of “communal representation” from the Minto-Morley Reforms. However only partial transfer of power was provided to the ministers responsible to the provinces and control over money in such areas were still in the hands of the British officialdom.

Two-Nation Theory

The very creation of Pakistan was based on the principle of the two-nation theory that remained one of the founding principles of the Pakistan Movement. According to the ideology of two-nation, the Indian Hindus and Muslims are two distinct nations irrespective of their specific area-wise commonalities including language and ethnicity and the primary identity and factor that unifies the Indian subcontinent Muslims is their religion. Thus the theory advocated for a distinct homeland for Muslims in the Muslim majority areas of India where they can practice Islam as the dominant religion. Lawyer and politician Muhammed Ali Jinnah who remained leader of the All-India Muslim League and played an instrumental role in curving out a separate nation for Muslims in the Indian subcontinent as Pakistan undertook and championed the ideology.

Several Hindu nationalist organizations were also influenced by the theory. The different reasons that motivated them included re-describing the Indian Muslims as second-class citizens in India and even to the extent of non-Indian foreigners; driving out the entire Muslim community from India; legally setting up a Hindu state in India; restricting conversions to Islam; and championing shuddhi that is conversion to Hinduism among Indian Muslims. One of the prominent freedom fighters of India, Lala Lajpat Rai, who remained leader of Hindu Mahasabha, which was formed to protect rights of the Hindu community in British Raj after forming of All India Muslim League, remained among the first Hindu proponents to back the two-nation theory. He controversially wrote in the Indian English-language daily newspaper ‘The Tribune’ on December 14, 1924, demanding a clear division of India into a Hindu State India and a Muslim India. Interpretations of the theory varied. While one advocated for a transfer of population that is removal of the entire Hindu community from Muslim-majority areas and vice-versa, another interpretation contended for sovereign autonomy where such transfer was not required and Hindus and Muslims can continue to co-exist although a seceding right for Muslim-majority areas of the Indian subcontinent was included.

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Government of India Act 1935, Second World War, Lahore Resolution & Quit India Movement

The Government of India Act, 1935 was passed initially in August 1935. Vital aspects of the Act included abolition of the diarchy system of the 1919 Act and introduction of diarchy at the Centre granting more autonomy to the British Indian provinces; setting up of a Federal Court; provision for setting up a “Federation of India”; introduction of advisory council while annulling Indian Council; initiating direct elections; instruments safeguarding minorities; and partially restructuring provinces. During the winter of 1936-37, provincial elections were held in British India when Indian National Congress came to power in eight provinces out of eleven while the All-India Muslim League were unsuccessful in forming government in any province. Setting up of elected governments however could not be made possible in most princely states because of defiance of the princes. Although Congress maintained that religious matters does not hold much significance to the Indians compared to economic and social matters, certain incidents gradually distanced the party from the Muslim masses in different areas. In one such incident the newly formed provincial administration of UP promulgated protection of cow as also the use of Hindi. Investigations were conducted by the Muslim League in provinces governed by Congress to assess the condition of Muslims. The Muslims gradually became concerned that in future they will be dominated and treated unjustly by the Hindus under the Congress government in independent India. As the Second World War broke in 1939, the then Viceroy of India Lord Linlithgow made an announcement in September 1939 that India was at war with Germany. He announced such a significant decision without consulting the elected representatives of the Indian people. While the Congress ministries resigned in October and November 1939 in protest of such action of the Viceroy, the Muslim League that was operating under the patronage of the state arranged celebrations from dominance of Congress, “Deliverance Day”, and backed Britain in their war effort. Jinnah was given same status as Gandhi by Linlithgow while Congress was labelled as a “Hindu organization”.

A three-day annual session from March 22 to March 24 in 1940 was held by the Muslim League. A formal political statement that became famous as the Lahore Resolution, also referred as “Pakistan Resolution” was adopted by the Muslim League on the last day of its annual session. The resolution envisaged ‘independent states’ for the Muslims in the eastern and northwestern parts of British India where the community was numerically a majority after making required territorial adjustments and also mentioned that the constituent units thus formed should be autonomous and sovereign.

In August 1940 Linlithgow proposed that Dominian status be given to India following the Second World War. In pursuit of garnering support from all Indian communities and parties in its war efforts, the British government also made a proposal famous as the ‘August Offer’ that year. It promised Executive Council expansion of the Viceroy in order to include more Indians, setting up of advisory war council, recognition of right of Indians to frame their own constitution following the war, and to take views of minorities into consideration. The proposal was however rejected by both the Congress and the Muslim League in September that year. The former rejected it as it was in some way providing a veto power to the Muslim League while the latter rejected it as no clear assurance was given in it for establishment of Pakistan. The civil disobedience movement was again revived by the Congress.

On August 8, 1942, in the midst of the Second World War, prominent Indian freedom fighter Mahatma Gandhi launched the Quit India Movement or the India August Movement at the Bombay session of the All-India Congress Committee and demanded an end of the British Raj in India. At the Gowalia Tank Maidan in Bombay while delivering his Quit India speech Gandhi made a Do or Die call. This was followed by mass protest by the All-India Congress Committee. Within hours the British imprisoned the entire leadership of Congress sans any trial and kept most of them in jail till the end of the war secluding them from the masses while the Muslim League freely spread their message.

1946 Elections, Direct Action Day

The new Prime Minister of the United Kingdom Clement Attlee, who backed the issue of Indian independence for years, gave the subject highest priority after assuming office. Back in India several mutinies broke since January 1946 that only led the Attlee government to expedite on the independence issue. Elections were held in India in early 1946 that saw Congress winning 8 of the 11 provinces thereby for most Hindus the Congress emerged as the legitimate successor of the British government. The majority of the Muslim vote and most reserved Muslim seats in the provincial assemblies were won by the Muslim League while securing all Muslim seats in the Central Assembly. Jinnah interpreted this success of the Muslim League as a popular demand of the Muslims for a separate state.

Image Credit : https://www.sbs.com.au/yourlanguage/punjabi/en/article/2017/09/21/pain-long-partition-story-india-and-pakistan

As Congress and Muslim League failed to come to an agreement, a Cabinet Mission Plan was devised by the British to transfer power from the British Raj to the Indian leadership. It proposed to preserve united India which was also desired by the Congress. An alternative plan was however placed by the Muslim League that included division of British India into a Hindu-majority India and a Muslim-majority Pakistan which was completely rejected by the Congress. In protest of such rejection, a general strike was planned by Muslim League on August 16, 1946, called the ‘Direct Action Day’ to display resolute of the Muslims to both Congress and the British. Also known as the ‘Great Calcutta Killings’, the ‘Direct Action Day’ witnessed the worst communal riots in the history of British India till such time. Extensive communal rioting took place in the city of Calcutta (presently Kolkata) in the Bengal province between Muslims and Hindus. The day also initiated ‘The Week of the Long Knives’. The brutality that extended from roads to attacks on women and children at homes continued for three days killing thousands of Hindus and Muslims. Although shocked by such turn of events, a Congress-led interim government was installed in September that year with Jawaharlal Nehru as prime minister of united India. Gradually the communal violence spread and left its mark in Noakhali in Bengal, Bihar, Rawalpindi and Garhmukteshwar in the United Provinces.

Mountbatten Plan, Indian Independence Act 1947, Partition & Independence of India, & the Radcliffe Line

One of the first Congress leaders who saw partition as inevitable was Vallabhbhai Patel also famous as Sardar Patel. He censured the induction of Muslim League ministers into the government as also the Direct Action campaign of Jinnah. He worked with civil servant V. P. Menon from December 1946 to January 1947 on the subject of a separate Muslim-state Pakistan formed out of Muslim-majority provinces. The partition of Punjab and Bengal suggested by Patel garnered considerable support from Indian public.

Lord Louis Mountbatten was appointed by Clement Attlee as the last Viceroy of India on February 20, 1947, and was delegated the responsibility of supervising transition of British India into independent India by June 30, 1948. He was instructed to avoid partition of India maintaining a united India by transferring autonomy and was also advised to adjust to changing situation so as to withdraw British out with minimal reputational damage. After gauging the communal situation Mountbatten also concluded that partition was the only option for quick and orderly transfer of power and a delay may start a civil war. On June 3, 1947, he announced a plan at a press conference famously known as the ‘Mountbatten Plan’ as also the date of independence as August 15, 1947. The plan that included partition of the Muslim-majority provinces of Bengal and Punjab accomplished the actual partition of British India into two separate dominions of India and Pakistan. The areas with Hindu and Sikh majority were assigned to new India while the Muslim-majority areas were assigned for the new state of Pakistan. Patel gave his nod and lobbied with Nehru and other Congress leaders to agree with the plan. Although Gandhi was still against partition, Congress approved the plan and Patel supervised the division of public assets while representing India on the Partition Council. Pakistan garnered one-third of the Indian Army, two of the major metropolitan cities out of six and two-fifth of the Indian railway lines. Patel and Nehru also went on to select the Indian council of ministers. On the other hand the Muslim League also approved the proposal as their demands for a separate state was accomplished. Others including Master Tara Singh representing the Sikhs and B. R. Ambedkar representing the Untouchable community also approved the plan.

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The British Parliament on July 18, 1947 passed the Indian Independence Act 1947. The Act led to the partition of British India into the two new independent dominions of India and Pakistan and discarded the suzerainty of the British over the princely states. The independent federal dominion of Pakistan that included two enclaves, East Pakistan (presently Bangladesh) and West Pakistan (modern-day Pakistan), geographically separated by India came into existence on August 14, 1947 with Muhammad Ali Jinnah as its first Governor General. India became an independent dominion in the British Commonwealth of Nations on August 15 that year and Jawaharlal Nehru took oath as the Prime Minister while Mountbatten became the nation’s first Governor General. Gandhi, the Father of the Nation, chose to be in Calcutta during partition where he made effort in stopping communal rioting, vowed to spend the Independence Day by keeping fast and spinning and worked with the newly migrated refugees.

The boundary demarcation line between India and Pakistan, famous as the Radcliffe Line, named after its architect, Sir Cyril Radcliffe, was published on August 17, 1947. Presently the western side of the line depicts the Indo-Pakistani border while its eastern side depicts the border between India and Bangladesh. Pakistan thereafter applied for United Nations (UN) membership which was accepted on September 30 that year by the General Assembly. India, a founding member of the UN since 1945 continued to remain a member of the intergovernmental organization after achieving dominion status.

Huge Population Transfer between India & Pakistan, Violence & Displacement & Settlement of Refugees

The announcement of the Radcliffe Line that included partition of Bengal and Punjab provinces was followed by a horrific period of intense communal violence and population transfer that was not foreseen by any of the Indian leaders. As accounted by eyewitnesses the nightmarish and barbaric incidents of violence with palpable tendencies of genocide included mutilation of victims including chopping off their limbs and genitalia; eviscerating pregnant women; hitting the heads of babies against brick walls; and exhibiting heads and dead bodies.

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The traumatic partition of India and Pakistan included huge population exchanges. People in millions were uprooted from their homeland and had to leave behind literally all their properties and belongings overnight and travel on foot, bullock carts trains and whatever means available to the new land that promised them a new life and home. According to sources there were 330 million people in India, 30 million people in East Pakistan and 30 million in West Pakistan after partition. Punjab accounted for the maximum number of displaced persons from the west (around 11.2 million). While 4.7 million Hindus and Sikhs migrated to India from West Pakistan, 6.5 million Muslims migrated to West Pakistan from India. In the eastern side 0.7 million Muslims migrated to East Pakistan from India and 2.6 million Hindus migrated to India from East Pakistan. A study made on data provided by the 1931 and 1951 Census revealed that around 2.23 million people went missing during mass transfer along the Punjab border which included 1.26 million missing Muslims who did not reach Pakistan after leaving western India and likewise 0.84 million missing Hindus/Sikhs.

It took years for both India and Pakistan to resettle the refugees. In India the refugees were given shelter initially in different military sites like the military barracks in Kingsway Camp and historical places like the Red Fort and Purana Qila. In pursuit of re-settling the refugees, the Indian government later took up several building projects that led to construction of housing colonies in Delhi like the Punjabi Bagh, Lajpat Nagar and Rajinder Nagar. The Indian government also came up with several schemes across India to provide provision for education, employment and other opportunities for refugees. The violent partition of British India way back in 1947 however developed a strenuous, complex and largely hostile relationship between India and Pakistan that prevail till today.

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Seventy-five Years After Indian Partition, Who Owns the Narrative?

Before it was an edict, and a death sentence, it was a rumor. To many, it must have seemed improbable; I imagine my grandmother, buying her vegetables at the market, settling her baby on her hip, craning to hear the news—a border, where? Two borders, to be exact. On the eve of their departure, in 1947, after more than three hundred years on the subcontinent, the British sliced the land into a Hindu-majority India flanked by a Muslim-majority West Pakistan and East Pakistan (now Bangladesh), a thousand miles apart. The boundaries were drawn up in five weeks by an English barrister who had famously never before been east of Paris; he flew home directly afterward and burned his papers. The slash of his pen is known as Partition.

A tidy word, “Partition.” Amid what the Punjabis call the raula —the “uproar”—the region convulsed with violence, Hindus and Sikhs on one side, Muslims on the other. Entire villages were massacred. Neighbors turned on each other. It’s estimated that a million people were killed, and that seventy-five thousand women and girls were abducted and raped, a third of them under the age of twelve. Millions of refugees fled in one of the largest and most rapid migrations in history. “Blood trains” crisscrossed the fresh border, carrying silent cargo—passengers slaughtered during the journey. Cities transformed into open-air refugee camps, like the one in Delhi to which my grandmother escaped in the night, alone with her children, feeding the baby opium, the story goes, so he would not cry. Bhisham Sahni’s “Tamas,” a 1973 Hindi novel set in that period, brings such a camp to life. The exhausted refugees are greeted by a functionary of the Relief Committee with the unpropitious nickname Statistics Babu. “I want figures, only figures, nothing but figures,” he instructs. The refugees mill around him, unhearing. They weep, stare blankly. They repeat, in exasperating detail, every step of their journeys. “Why don’t you understand?” Statistics Babu pleads. “I am not here to listen to the whole ‘Ramayana.’ Give me figures—how many dead, how many wounded, how much loss of property and goods. That is all.”

Is that where the story lies? What do “figures, only figures” convey of the full horror and absurdity of 1947? Of a border that cut through forests, families, and shrines, that saw wild animals apportioned between the two countries and historical artifacts snapped in half? In “Tamas,” the testimonies of the survivors reveal all that records omit and conceal. A refugee is desperate to recover his wife’s gold bangles: won’t Statistics Babu help him? Those bangles still circle his wife’s wrists, however, and she lies at the bottom of a well. It is a detail perhaps lifted from the case of the real-life village of Thoa Khalsa, now in Pakistan, where almost a hundred Sikh women drowned themselves and their children. We don’t have the figures for women killed by their own families or forced to kill themselves in the name of protecting their honor. There are no records of those who died of heartbreak. My family migrated from an area not far from Thoa Khalsa. Only my great-uncle remained; he lay beheaded in the courtyard of his home. Three months later, his wife died—of grief, some say. Their children were scattered. There are no firm figures available for orphaned children, or for children abandoned along the journey because they were too small to walk quickly enough.

Discover notable new fiction and nonfiction.

This past year has marked seventy-five years of Partition, a process of fracturing that continues in the imagination and in memory. Each generation has posed new questions, searching for places where the stories can be found—in statistics, in stubborn reticence, in a pair of gold bangles. A sturdy consensus long held that the fullest account of 1947 could be found not in facts and figures—not in nonfiction at all—but in texts like “Tamas,” in literature. We were steered strenuously away from the scholarship and toward fiction and poetry—often by the scholars themselves. “Creative writers have captured the human dimensions of Partition far more effectively than have historians,” the scholar Ayesha Jalal has written. Novels were said to surpass even survivor testimonies for vividness and accuracy. Two decades ago, Akash Kapur, writing in the Times about a landmark work of Partition oral history, directed the reader back to “the excellent fiction” of Partition, such as Khushwant Singh’s “Train to Pakistan” (1956), which “does a far better job of evoking the terror, the bewilderment and the remorse that still shadow so many lives on the subcontinent.”

Partition literature fills a long shelf. There is early fiction by survivors and spectators: realist narratives (Singh’s “Train to Pakistan”), feminist epics (Yashpal’s “This Is Not That Dawn”), stripped-down, nightmarish short stories (Saadat Hasan Manto’s “Black Margins”). In the nineteen-eighties came a new flourishing, with now canonical novels by Salman Rushdie (“Midnight’s Children”), Amitav Ghosh (“Shadow Lines”), and Bapsi Sidhwa (“Ice Candy Man”). Certain tropes and tendencies repeat. There is a reliance on coming-of-age stories, in which the loss of the nation’s innocence maps neatly onto a character’s; twins illustrate a conjoined fate; a dead woman personifies the fractured motherland. (These tropes are so alluring that a recent American young-adult novel about Partition, Veera Hiranandani’s “The Night Diary,” combined all of them, in a coming-of-age story about a twin born to a mother who dies in childbirth.)

But the unity, and moral power, of the genre derives from its sustained confrontations with the violence of Partition. The official narrative of independence was one of celebration. “Before the birth of freedom we have endured all the pains of labor and our hearts are heavy with the memory of this sorrow,” Jawaharlal Nehru announced on August 14, 1947, as independence and Partition were imminent. “Nevertheless, the past is over and it is the future that beckons to us.” The killings were portrayed as a spasm of collective madness, a regrettable development on the path to progress. In fact, it was the efficiency and organization of the attacks that came to distinguish the episode, and its stamp was the targeting and torture of women.

What we call Partition fiction might be more pointedly described as one of the most extensive bodies of literature committed to cataloguing rape and sexual terrorism—the frenzy that left corpses riddled with bite marks, pregnant women slit open, and religious slogans branded upon faces and genitals. What Nehru dismissed as labor pains, what films dealt with obliquely, and some families not at all, is bluntly documented in the novels—the grisly discovery in “Ice Candy Man,” for example, of a bag stuffed with severed breasts. Novels filled in the extensive gaps in the archives. “There were no trials for perpetrators of violence, the authorities took no statements, and very little data was gathered,” the historian Manan Ahmed has written. “Even the trains, which ran covered in blood across the Punjab border, were scrubbed clean. . . . In fact, the only physical traces left are the people themselves. And they too shucked their old identities for fear of more violence.”

If it seems crude to treat literature as testimony, we cannot ignore the fact that some writers conceived of themselves as eyewitnesses. They shared a commitment to preserve not only what went unsaid but what felt unsayable—that the violence of Partition was not necessarily an aberration in the lives of women, for one. The upheaval could be liberation—the domestic spaces to which women were confined could protect but also imprison, as Daisy Rockwell notes in the afterword to her translation of Khadija Mastur’s 1962 novel, “The Woman’s Courtyard.” As early as 1950, Amrita Pritam’s novel “Pinjar” examined the refusal of families to take back women and girls who had been abducted and “contaminated.” The sexual violation of men during that period remains a taboo subject; I find mention of castrations in “Train to Pakistan” and almost nowhere else.

This is the work of the novel: to notice, knit, remember, record. The novel confers wholeness and unity to a story of division. The novel—it cannot help itself—reconciles. But it was only by taking a truncheon to the form that some of the greatest Partition fiction was created. Out of the rubble of the cities and the scorched fields emerged Saadat Hasan Manto’s glittering, razored shards. A recent collection, “The Dog of Tithwal,” gathers classics by the Urdu master of the short story. Born in 1912 to a Kashmiri family in the northern state of Punjab, Manto fell under the spell of Gorky and Poe, not to mention the rotgut that would kill him at the age of forty-two. Fluent in almost every genre, he wrote while sitting on the family sofa, his daughters climbing over him as he churned out polemics, screenplays, and twenty-two volumes of short stories marked by a warm, coarse, and occasionally menacing sexuality that so agitated the censors. He was tried for (and acquitted of) obscenity six times; his story “Khol Do” was condemned as an incitement to rape. Partition tore him from Mumbai, his home and muse. Marooned in Lahore, he began writing furiously about what he had seen. The most famous of these stories, “Toba Tek Singh,” tells the tale—based in fact—of India and Pakistan dividing up patients of mental institutions according to their religion. One Sikh inmate cannot figure out which country his village belongs to; he roots himself between the barbed-wire fences of each border, and dies on a patch of unclaimed earth.

Manto established his distinctive form in the book “Black Margins” (1948): thirty-two sketches of compressed power, some no more than a few sentences long, which brought to life the obscene logic of the new world. In “The Advantage of Ignorance,” a sniper takes aim at a child. His companion objects, but not for the expected reason. “You are out of bullets,” he exclaims. In “Double Cross,” a character complains about being sold bad petrol—it won’t set fire to any shops. The stories are not just expressions of shock; they are modes of refusal—a response to facts that will not, ought not, be easily assimilated into a narrative. The ink feels fresh, wet. Manto remains our eternal contemporary, his capacity to unnerve undiminished.

Even his admirers can be caught trying to tame him—pushing him into earnest ethical stances. In the introduction to the recent collection, the poet Vijay Seshadri describes Manto’s Urdu as firm, spare, and “easily accessible to translation.” In truth, Manto frightens his translators. The rehabilitation mission starts with them. Khalid Hasan begins his translation by defanging the title of “Khol Do,” which Manto is said to have considered his best work. Hasan names it “The Return,” instead of the literal translation, “Open It”—the command issued in the story’s chilling climax. As it begins, a Muslim girl has clearly been abducted by a Hindu mob. Men from her community go in search of her. When her father spots them accompanying a body, the reader understands that the girl, Sakina, has been attacked again, by the very men who promised to rescue her. She is brought to a hospital, seemingly lifeless. A doctor enters the small, stifling room, and gestures to a window: “Open it.” There is a jerk of movement; Sakina’s hands move to untie the drawstring of her pants and lower them down her thighs. Her father exults—“She is alive”—and the doctor breaks into a cold sweat.

There’s a crucial line in the story. In Urdu, it reads, “ Sakina ke murda jism mein jumbish hui. ” Hasan has variously translated it as “The young woman on the stretcher moved slightly” and “Sakina’s body stirred.” A more faithful translation would be something like “There was a movement in Sakina’s corpse.” It was Hasan who respectfully refers to Sakina as “the young woman,” Hasan who wants her still to be Sakina. Manto refers to her corpse. He is interested in the threshold that she has crossed, what the doctor notices and the father cannot—the threshold we keep encountering in his stories about Partition.

Manto’s fiction routinely blurs the line between life and death, sanity and madness. Characters merge with their weapons. (In “The Last Salute,” a platoon leader “felt as though he had turned into a rifle, but one whose trigger was jammed.”) Weapons act as agents in their own right. (From “Mishtake”: “Ripping the belly cleanly, the knife moved in a straight line down the midriff, in the process slashing the cord which held the man’s pajamas in place.”) These transformations occur beyond the characters’ awareness. You will cross the threshold without knowing , Manto seems to say. You will not be able to see what you have become . There is no self-knowledge or remorse, no greater sense of justice than there was in 1947. Nor does the author permit himself the reprieve of moralizing. There are only loops of retribution. “Bitter Harvest” begins with a Muslim father screaming the name of his young daughter, who has been raped and murdered: “Sharifan! Sharifan!” The story ends with him seizing, raping, and strangling a Hindu girl, leaving her father to find the body and scream her name: “Bimla, my daughter, Bimla.”

In the past generation, though, Partition “shimmered away as a suitable subject” for fiction, in the words of the literary critic Nilanjana Roy. The mantle was taken up by oral historians. Recurrent eruptions of violence reawakened memories of the killings of 1947—its unfinished business, the rot in the wound. The 2002 Gujarat riots, in particular, shared the grammar of Partition violence: the frenzy masking careful coördination, the targeting of women, the impunity. The feminist writer and publisher Urvashi Butalia’s “The Other Side of Silence” (1998) had been sparked by the Sikh massacres of 1984, which led her to think more deeply about her family’s history. Through interviews with survivors, Butalia traced a story of Partition as its meaning was shaped (and evaded) in private life, in families. This was Partition seen from the perspective of women, children, Dalits, all those left out of the grand political narratives, and told with the kind of feeling and detail that, as the scholar Deepti Misri writes, could never have made it into Statistics Babu’s ledger. The testimonies compiled by Butalia—as well as by Ashis Nandy, Veena Das, Ritu Menon, and Kamla Bhasin—rippled with complexities and contradiction. Memories of loss exist, sometimes queasily, alongside memories of gain—the birth of nations, the pride of survival, the unexpected opportunities created in the upheaval. I was weaned on stories of my family’s Partition: my beheaded kinsman; my grandmother wheedling extra rations for her children in the camps; the two young girls, sisters, who went missing. Beneath these stories pulsed the uncomfortable knowledge that the very tumult of Partition allowed some families like mine, living under the boot of brutal feudal hierarchy, their first opportunity to prise themselves free.

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In the past few decades, popular chroniclers influenced both by fiction and by oral history have taken up polyphonic approaches. Yasmin Khan’s “The Great Partition” and Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar’s “The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia,” both published in 2007, at the sixtieth anniversary of the event, synthesized Statistics Babu’s facts and figures with the testimonies of survivors. More expansive histories of Partition began to be told, attending to the links between 1947 and the Indo-Pakistani war of 1971, the migration of Dalits, and the effects of Partition on tribal communities, on Kashmir, on the diaspora.

At its seventy-fifth anniversary, Partition has found still more eclectic forms. The new generation coming to the story—midnight’s grandchildren—are not scholars, for the most part. They typically have no specialized credentials. Theirs is a different qualification: this is their inheritance. They include the New York rapper Heems, who describes himself as a “product of Partition”; the installation artist Pritika Chowdhry, who constructs “anti-memorials”; Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, an Oscar-winning filmmaker and the founder of the Citizen Archive of Pakistan ( CAP ); and Guneeta Singh Bhalla, a physicist who has established a crowdsourced library of testimonies. It’s no longer enough for fiction to fill the silences. These self-taught archivists search for whatever evidence they can find; they build on the work of oral historians like Butalia, finding the archives in the last remaining survivors.

Their ranks are thinning. That young woman, so startled by the rumors, who fled with her children—my grandmother—died in 2006. Her eldest child, the child who could walk—my aunt—died last year. Organizations like Obaid-Chinoy’s CAP and Bhalla’s 1947 Partition Archive gather testimonies with fresh urgency. Online communities invite survivors to upload their stories or find childhood friends. Project Dastaan, an organization formed by students at Oxford, not only collects testimonies but also offers refugees a chance to “visit” their homeland using virtual-reality headsets.

This cohort of oral historians has confronted a reticence born not only of suffering but also of shame, arising from complicity, intimate betrayals—Manto’s thresholds. “The true horror is not what your neighbors did to you,” the historian Faisal Devji notes, “but what your own family members might have done out of force of necessity: Leave somebody behind who was handicapped, who was unable to walk or flee.”

In “Remnants of Partition” (2019), Aanchal Malhotra, a Delhi-based artist turned oral historian, devised a method to sidestep the silences. Her grandparents, Punjabi migrants from Pakistan, were skillful at thwarting her questions about their journey, but conversations suddenly bloomed when she asked what they carried with them. Her great-uncle produced a ghara , a metallic vessel for churning yogurt, and a gaz , a yardstick from the family tailoring business. He absently handled the objects as he spoke; they stimulated memories of a rich, associative, unexpected kind, full of longing. Malhotra took the same question to her grandmother, and to other survivors. Her book is a history of Partition told in twenty-one possessions: a string of pearls, a sword. These objects are not relics; many are pointedly, movingly, still in use. Her grandmother travelled across the border with a small folding knife given to her by her family, who told her to use it against attackers or on herself. The same blade, “swallowed by rust,” now accompanies Malhotra’s grandmother on her morning walks, as she slices leaves from an aloe plant—the weapon transformed into an agent of healing.

The music video opens in a train station—the archetypal setting of Partition horror. The windows are shattered; debris lies scattered on the floor. The waiting area fills with passengers, looking at one another warily. A man sitting alone on a bench begins to sing a ghazal by the Pakistani poet (and Partition migrant) Saifuddin Saif: “This moonlit night has been a long time coming / The words I want to say have been a long time coming.” The mood warms. A traveller darns another’s torn clothing; a woman admires another’s baby.

“Chandni Raat,” an Urdu single from the Pakistani American singer Ali Sethi, was released in 2019, just days before fighting broke out between India and Pakistan. Once again, war seemed imminent. The YouTube comment section of the accompanying music video became a gathering place much like the train station’s waiting area. Strangers congregated, invoking the song’s message of unity. “It became kind of an anthem,” Sethi says. “It felt genuinely miraculous.”

The son of prominent journalists, Sethi grew up in Lahore—“a haunted city,” he calls it. The old part of the city was full of signs of the people who fled, some sixty per cent of the population; home alcoves once reserved for shrines now held a refrigerator or an electric fan. “For me, turning to Hindustani music was the only way I could unpartition myself—go back to a place that was not only pre-Partition but pre-colonial,” he says. Hindustani music, as he describes it, is sacred and secular, a mongrel of Hindu, Sikh, and Muslim traditions. He was taught by two renowned singers, both Partition migrants, and during the COVID lockdown he used social media to bring together musicians from across the border to collaborate. He cites a teacher of his who taught him that metaphors “help us to dialogue across distances.” Song, he says, is a space we can live inside. Just as the little knife of Malhotra’s grandmother was repurposed, the train station in the “Chandni Raat” video has been, too—a place of death reconceived as a place of reconciliation.

Violence has long felt emblematic of the story of Partition—it was what lurked in Manto’s “black margins”—and that history of violence is now deployed as a political weapon, stoking suspicion, retribution. Anam Zakaria, who works on cross-cultural exchange between India and Pakistan, describes younger generations—who have grown up in the shadow of war—as even more hostile toward one another than the generation who survived Partition. India’s Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, recently declared August 14th to be Partition Horrors Remembrance Day. By choosing the date of Pakistan’s independence day (India celebrates August 15th as its day of independence), and by carefully referring to those denied “cremation,” Modi framed it as an occasion to mourn only Hindu and Sikh victims, and to single out Muslims as aggressors. A younger generation struggles not just to devise new modes of accessing and telling the story of Partition but also to prevent it from being used to justify further bloodletting. They want to return the event to survivors and their families—and to highlight memories and emotions that have been occluded by the fixation on carnage. Malhotra asks, “Why do we immediately think of the trains? Why don’t we think of the friendship left behind or the love affairs that may have gotten cut?” Kavita Puri, a BBC journalist, similarly wants to see beyond the brutalities: “Partition, though filled with horror in so many ways, is also a story about love.” Can the story of Partition be told in a different genre? Will love stories keep the blood at bay?

In “Tomb of Sand,” the winner of the 2022 International Booker Prize, Geetanjali Shree pays homage to Partition fiction, imagining the great novelists gathering near the border. “The group of Partition writers has come to sit in a row, and every person has a name card at their place like at a formal banquet. Bhisham Sahni. Balwant Singh. Joginder Pal. Manto. Rahi Masoom Raza. Shaani. Intizar Hussain. Krishna Sobti. Khushwant Singh. Ramanand Sagar. Manzoor Ehtesham. Rajinder Singh Bedi.” Yet Shree also explores the possibility of writing one’s own story of Partition. Ma, the central figure in the novel, an eighty-year-old widow, spends more than a hundred pages of the book lying in bed, her back to the reader, before finally, heroically, reclaiming her life, by going back across the border to Pakistan and falling in love.

“A border,” she proposes,

does not enclose, it opens out. It creates a shape—it adorns an edge. This side of the edging blossoms, as does that. Embroider the border with a shimmering vine. Stud it with precious stones. What is a border? It enhances a personality. It gives strength. It doesn’t tear apart. A border increases recognition. Where two sides meet and both flourish. A border ornaments their meeting.

Partition stories offer few consolations; one wants to hold this one tightly in hand, like Grandmother’s little knife. But what is that folded blade but sheathed violence? Has it completed its work? How does one begin to tell a tale so turbulently in progress? “It will jump, it will cross over, the story will not end,” Shree writes. Manto’s shards, unblunted by any urge toward narrative neatness, find their mark for a reason.

There’s a quiet detail in “The Dog of Tithwal,” one planted delicately, as if designed to be lost amid the gaudy violence. The Pakistani Army and the Indian Army gather on two hills, facing each other. Between bursts of gunfire, the soldiers sing. Only the reader can know that they are both singing a folk song of romance and longing. The reader experiences, at first, a frisson of recognition— ah, to be so alike, on either side of a divide . But how little it matters, once the action of the story is under way. Both sides send a dog back and forth, frightening and torturing it to death. The dog cannot hear the singing; he cannot name the song. Sing whatever you like while you can, the writer seems to say. The black margins are closing in. ♦

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