Short History Of... - The Partition of India

Episode Date: February 6, 2023

In 1947, the British divided up its former colony of India into two provinces. What followed was confusion, chaos, and an unprecedented wave of sectarian violence that left up to a million dead. 15 million more were forced to flee their homes. So why was the country broken up? What prompted the ferocious backlash? And how do the events of 75 years ago still haunt the region, its residents and the diaspora? This is a Short History of The Partition of India. Written by Jo Furniss. With thanks to Nisid Hajari, author of Midnight’s Furies: The Deadly Legacy of India’s Partition, and Aanchal Malhotra, author of Remnants of Partition. For ad-free listening, exclusive content and early access to new episodes, join Noiser+. Now available for Apple and Android users. Click the Noiser+ banner on Apple or go to noiser.com/subscriptions to get started with a 7-day free trial. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It is the 16th of August 1946. In Calcutta, capital of the Indian province of Bengal, a young man rides a tram over a bridge that crosses the pale green water of the Huli River. He is a law student who arrived in the city only days ago. He's keen to explore his new home, but even though it is still morning, the tea shop wallows are packing up stalls, shopkeepers are pulling down shutters, and streets are blocked by tar drums. His fellow passengers are jittery. As the tram rattles along, he overhears the conversations of other travelers. Most people are on their way to Direct Action Day, a political rally in Esplanade Park.

But there are rumors that mobs of hot-headed thugs, so-called gundas, have been seen roaming the city. No one wants to get caught up in trouble, but they do want to hear the political speeches. When they reach the stop for the Esplanade and pile off the tram, on a whim, the student follows the crowd to see what's going on. Bengal is the only Muslim-led province in India. Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the leader of the Muslim League, is due to address the rally here today.

He fears that both the British colonial government and the Hindu-led Indian Congress want to sideline the country's Muslim minority. Controversially, Jinnah has called for a separate Muslim nation. The future of the country is at stake, which is why so many people are making their way to his rally. Down on the crowded street, the student loses sight of the passengers from the tram.

Streams of people sweep him along towards the park. Suddenly, there is a bang and a cloud of smoke issuing from a side street. There are screams, and the crowd tightens around him. People shout, Gunders! A mob is coming! He fights his way to one side and slips out of the surging crowd into an alleyway. Abandoning his idea of joining the rally, he decides to go home. But the route is dangerous. Groups of young men march in packs, swinging brickbats. He hurries on, keeping his head down as he passes overturned rickshaws,

eviscerated shops, vehicles set ablaze. Everywhere, people running and crying, nursing bloody head wounds. If he spots a gang, he cowers in a doorway. Whether they are Muslim or Hindu, he keeps out of sight. By some miracle, he finds his way back to his street, his building, his room, and he locks himself inside. For the rest of the day, sounds of violence rise and fall like the winds of a storm. At one point, he cracks open his shutters,

only to recoil from the sight of armed men outside. A brick smashes the glass and he barricades the window. The tempest rages all night. By dawn the streets seem calmer. When the student creeps out for a cup of water, he freezes at the sound of a thunderous rumble. A tank rolling past his alleyway. British troops. He runs to address the soldier,

asking if there is somewhere safe to go. The soldier waves a pistol and tells him to get inside if he knows what's good for him. Gunder's all over the place. The whole city has gone to hell, he says. The tank rolls away. But the sparse military presence is too little, too late. He wanders through a devastated neighborhood. The streets are lined with rubble and food, strewn with once valuable but now filthy fabrics

that have been looted from sari shops. He stumbles over abandoned weapons, bricks and sticks, burnt-out fire torches. Rivulets of blood seep out from crumpled piles of clothing, and he staggers back, realizing that these are bodies. He can stand no more. He has the idea to get out of Calcutta, go home to his village, but there are no trains, no way to contact his family. Alone in a city that is tearing itself apart, the student goes back to his digs and locks himself inside. The rioting and massacre at Direct Action Day

becomes known as the Great Calcutta Killing. The turmoil lasts four days and costs thousands of lives, both Muslim and Hindu. It sparks a chain reaction of reprisals and retaliations in other parts of Bengal and across the Indian subcontinent. But there is worse to come. In response to the sectarian violence and a political impasse, the British make a momentous decision. They divide the region into India and the two separate provinces that make up Pakistan, one homeland for Muslims and one for Hindus and Sikhs. Partition led to the largest human migration the world has ever seen,

some 15 million people left their homes in an attempt to flee the bloodshed on the scale of genocide. Up to one million were killed, numbers so huge they couldn't be accurately recorded at the time and have never been officially confirmed. What is certain is that what should have been a time of joy, the liberation of two countries from the British Empire, instead became a tragedy. So why was the country broken up?

What prompted the ferocious backlash? And how do the events of 75 years ago still haunt the region, its residents and the diaspora? I'm John Hopkins, and this is a short history of Indian Partition. When violence spirals out of control in Calcutta, the British are still in charge of India. Since the mid-1700s they have dominated the region, first through the rule of the British East India Company, and then under the control of the British Raj. But times are changing.

By 1946, the sun is finally setting on the British Empire. Independence for India is inevitable, but there will be darkness before the dawn. The Indian subcontinent is one of the most ethnically diverse regions in the world. Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims live side by side, as well as Christians, Buddhists, Jews, Jains, Parsis and Zoroastrians. Hindus make up the majority, with a population of over 350 million. There are also almost 100 million Muslims. 50 million. There are also almost a hundred million Muslims. With the area roughly in the shape of a butterfly, this large minority is concentrated mainly in the wings, the northwest and northeast provinces, on opposite sides of the country, a thousand miles apart. In

addition, the overall population includes six million Sikhs, who mostly live in Punjab, also in the northwest wing. It's a complicated geographical and political landscape, and by 1946 the British are in a hurry to rid themselves of the burden, not least because World War II left them almost bankrupt. Nisid Hajiri is a journalist and author of the book Midnight's Furies, the Deadly Legacy of India's Partition. At this point, it is clear that the British are leaving India. They are going to hand power to Indians, but are waiting for Indian political parties to agree amongst themselves how they're going to share power. going to share power. And the problem is that the largest party, the Indian National Congress Party, which is a broad-based national secular non-sectarian party that wants to govern over a united India, is faced by its rivals in the Muslim League, led by Muhammad Ali Jinnah,

who insists that Muslims in the subcontinent would be at too much risk in India dominated by Hindus, and that in the areas of the subcontinent where Muslims are a majority, they should create their own country that they can govern themselves. Both Jinnah and Jawaharlal Nehru, the leader of the Congress Party, Mahatma Gandhi, another leader of the Congress Party, they all agree to this compromise in 1946. But then Nehru goes in front of the press and says something to the effect of, this is just something that we're signing for now to get the British out of India.

So Jinnah then drops out of the compromise as well. And on top of it, importantly, calls for mass protests around the country, peaceful protests, in what he calls a direct action day on August 16th, 1946. But in one city in Calcutta, the protests spiral out of control and result in riots. Something fundamentally had broke then. The trust between the two communities was really severed. I think it would have been very difficult after that moment to establish a united India in which all sides felt comfortable and safe. In February 1947, Lord Louis Mountbatten is sent to oversee the transition of power.

A cousin of King George VI and a great-grandson of Queen Victoria, the 47-year-old Mountbatten is a hero of World War II. He steps off a military aircraft into a warm Delhi afternoon, wearing a bright white uniform. He is greeted by Pandit Nehru, the leader of the Indian Congress, and a 31-gun salute. Mountbatten moves into Viceroy House, a colonial residence with a staff of 5,000. He quickly bonds with Nehru, but doesn't find relations so easy with Jinnah, the Muslim leader. Mountbatten's instructions are to hold the Indian territories together, but he quickly concludes that the fractures run too deep. By the summer of 1947, it's inevitable that independence means partition.

But even as the handover approaches, most of those involved still cannot imagine that their country would be divided. Anshal Malhotra is an oral historian and author of the book Remnants of Partition. The boundary commissions that partitioned the provinces of Punjab and Bengal held five members each. And these members were judges of differentab and Bengal, held five members each. And these members were judges of different religions, Hindus, Muslims. And on the Punjab commission, there was someone called Dr. Bakshi Dechand, who was a justice. And his daughter, when I met her in Delhi,

she told me that despite the fact that her father was always in conversations with leaders like Nehru and was on the boundary commission and so close to the politics of that time, he did not believe that partition would happen. He could not believe that Lahore would not be a part of India. While people struggle to understand the coming transformation, Mountbatten decides that the best way to avoid further bloodshed, even civil war, is to bring forward the date of independence. So Britain announces that instead of parting ways in 1948 as planned, it will pull out of India on the 15th of August 1947.

Several areas like Punjab in the northwest and Bengal in the northeast have large communities of both Hindus and Muslims. These are the two provinces located on opposite wings of the country, without a land bridge between them. But the idea is to combine them into one nation called Pakistan. To further complicate matters, these provinces are also the homelands of the Sikh population. How is it possible to divide these territories fairly between the various communities that lay claim to them?

The British come up with a simple solution for a complex problem. They will draw a line on a map subdividing Punjab and Bengal into two sides. One side for Hindus, the other for Muslims. They are not sure yet where to put the Sikhs. The decision of where to put the new boundaries goes to Sir Cyril Radcliffe, a lawyer who has never been to India in his life. He arrives in Delhi just 36 days before the date set for independence. So he was a British lawyer who was brought out to India, perhaps, you know, because he

knew nothing about India and could claim to be independent. But someone needed to draw a border between those areas of the Punjab and Bengal that were majority Muslim and majority non-Muslim. He had two Muslim and two non-Muslim judges that were supposed to help him with this. But of course, they deadlocked on key matters. And so it was left to him to make the final decision. And he didn't even go visit the areas that he was dividing. He was sitting in a bungalow in the Viceroy's estate in Delhi, sweating profusely in the heat and trying to figure this out. But this term Pakistan had been floating around for a while. It was at Cambridge

University that this term was first coined. Of course, the word park means pure and stan is land, so it's land of the pure. But Pakistan is actually an acronym for the five northern units of India. And those are Punjab, the Afghan province, which was the northwest frontier province, Punjab, the Afghan province, which was the northwest frontier province, Kashmir, Sindh, and Balochistan. No one really knows what this partition means and where this Pakistan is going to lie. The larger problem is that nobody wanted to come out early and say this is where the border is going to go. Jinnah didn't want to say it because he was hoping to convince the Sikhs to join Pakistan and, you know, so that he could take more of the Punjab. Nehah didn't want to say it because he was hoping to convince the Sikhs to join Pakistan so that he could take more of the Punjab. Nehru didn't want to admit it because exactly the

reverse. He thought that the Sikh threats would be useful to him, that he could go to the British and say, look, you need to give India more of the Punjab, otherwise there's going to be violence. And the British didn't want to admit it because they wanted to have a peaceful handover of power and leave with their heads held high before facing up to any of these problems. At Viceroy House, Radcliffe is given a huge wall map on a wooden stand and a pile of census lists. He faces a puzzle the size of a subcontinent. The population of Lahore in the north is 60% Muslim and 40% Hindu and Sikh.

But the minority Hindus own the majority of buildings and businesses, some 80% of the city's wealth. So, should that city go to Hindus or Muslims, India or Pakistan? As Radcliffe ponders his map, wielding a pen like a scalpel, the people of Lahore wait to learn what their national identity will be a month from now. It is late July 1947. In Lahore, a teenager named Tilak is hurrying on foot to his mahala or neighborhood.

The city is the capital of Punjab and it is a cosmopolitan place full of Muslim mosques, Hindu temples and Sikh gurdwaras. It's also a center of education, medicine and filmmaking. Tilak would like to work in the burgeoning fashion industry. Today he's wearing tight-fitting churidar trousers under a long kota, or shirt, in the Punjabi fashion. Normally he likes to check out the street styles, but today he has other matters on his mind. He reaches home. Neighborhood dogs bark as he sneaks around the back of his parents' house to the area where his family shares a well with other Hindu households. The air is filled with cooking smells, and children lug buckets of water back to their kitchens.

As Tilak passes the first well, he exchanges a friendly greeting with the Muslim mother from next door. But he hurries on to the second Hindu well. The two faiths live peacefully together in this street, even though they are segregated in small ways, like the wells. Impatiently, Tilak checks his watch. Soon, a girl named Amila arrives. While she fills a metal bucket, Tilak delivers the message that has been weighing him down. His family are leaving Lahore, tonight. His father's fabric shop was looted by a mob. And they've been warned by a Muslim friend that more attacks are planned.

It is too dangerous for Hindus to stay. So his father found a place to go in Delhi. Tilak urges O'Meala to persuade her father to come too. But she shakes her head. Her father will not leave. He was born in Lahore. He built a business in Lahore, and he will die in Lahore. Tilak sighs, fearing this last may come sooner than anticipated. Though he had been hoping to propose to a miller one day, instead he finds himself saying goodbye. He hands her a one rupee coin, which he polished with vinegar to a silvery shine.

It will bring luck and prosperity. Then he turns away, leaving her by the Hindu well. In Lahore in particular, the capital of Punjab, that summer you started to see a degree of violence that was almost surreptitious. Hindus dominated the commercial community there. There were a lot of the merchants in the city, so owned a lot of the property. And Muslim gangs started conducting arson attacks, setting these businesses on fire in an effort to drive their owners out of the city and across into what would end up being India. And so the Hindu community in Lahore, many started to leave, many started to pack up their valuables.

And it was this kind of shadow war in June, July, early August of 1947, specifically because it wasn't clear where the Punjab would be divided. They thought they were just going for a couple of weeks, a couple of months at best, so they would carry maybe their summer clothes. They would carry the collection of books they loved the most. Sir Cyril Radcliffe writes home to say that 80 million people will soon hold a grievance against him.

On August 9th, with only days to spare, he hands over the map to Mountbatten and leaves the country, never to return. He burns all his working documents and refuses to accept the fee owed to him by the British government. He later admits that, I had no alternative. The time at my disposal was so short that I could not do a better job. Mountbatten keeps the details of the map and its new dividing lines a secret until the British have handed over responsibility to the new leaders. Across the region, hundreds of millions of people prepare to welcome independence. Pakistan goes first, celebrating its liberation one day before India. The reasons for this are contested.

Some say it is to coincide with Muslim Ramadan celebrations. Others say it was because Mountbatten wanted to be present at both handover ceremonies. The Pakistan independence celebrations were held on August 14th and Mountbatten went to Karachi, which was quite far from the border and was not at that particular moment affected by the violence that was already starting to take place. The tensions weren't as great. And then the next day, Mountbatten flew over the Punjab,

where he could see smoke from fires rising up from villages across the Punjab, flew back to Delhi, which again, relatively distant from the border, where huge celebrations had been planned, and where there was really unmitigated joy at independence. And these crowds that greeted Nehru and Mountbatten were ecstatic. And this is part of the reason Mountbatten had delayed the release of the maps showing the new border, because he didn't want anything to affect this moment, this image of the British leaving on good terms, handing over power as a responsible state and maintaining this friendship with both Pakistan and India. As dawn breaks on the two new nations, the world watches with bated breath. August the 15th, 1947, Independence Day for India.

A subcontinent larger than the whole of Europe becomes two self-governing dominions within the British Commonwealth of Nations. Pandit Nehru, Congress Leader, is India's Prime Minister. within the British Commonwealth of Nations. Pandit Nehru, Congress leader, is India's Prime Minister. At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom.

Are we brave enough and wise enough to grasp this opportunity and accept the challenge of the future? Mohammed Ali Jinnah, Muslim chief, becomes Pakistan's governor general. The creation of the new state has placed a tremendous responsibility on the citizens of Pakistan. It gives them an opportunity to demonstrate to the world how a nation containing many elements can live in peace. Mahatma Gandhi, the 78-year-old mystic, stands inscrutable and aloof. Today, the fate of 400 million Indians is in the hands of these leaders. Independence is celebrated across the subcontinent.

But the people living on either side of Radcliffe's hastily drawn lines through the Punjab and Bengal remain in the dark about which nation they actually belong to. There are so many bizarre things about that time. But I don't think anything is more bizarre than independence granted for Pakistan on August 14, independence granted for India on August 15, 1947, and then the partition line being announced two days later on August 17. So in fact, people were independent before they knew what side of the border they were on. before they knew what side of the border they were on. There are cases recorded of cities or people in those cities thinking they are part of one country, raising the flag of that country for three days and then changing the flag three days later

when the border is eventually announced. In the northwestern city of Karachi, a green and white flag is hoisted in the capital of the new Pakistan. Fifteen hundred miles away, the same flag flies over Dhaka, the main city of Pakistan's eastern province. Partition means a hundred million Muslims are citizens of two separate Pakistani provinces with a vast nation of India lying in between them. In India, the new flag is a tricolour in saffron, white and green.

In its centre stands the blue Ashoka Chakra, or Wheel of Time. It's apt because millions of people are in a race against time now, trying to reach a place of safety. Minority Hindus and Sikhs migrate inwards from the wings towards India. Minority Muslims migrate outwards towards the two outlying provinces of Pakistan. People determined to stay in their homes find themselves in the crosshairs of sectarian tensions. Some people decided to move on their own because they saw what was happening. I think, you know, within a few days it became clear that it was going to be impossible to stay if you were in one of these areas that were being wracked by violence. I mean, initially, Nehru and the prime minister of Pakistan, Liaquat Ali Khan, went to the Punjab and tried to tamp down the violence in hopes that people would be able to stay where they were.

that people would be able to stay where they were. You know, this started in Lahore and Amritsar, these two cities that are very close to each other, but on different sides of the border, where the killings, you know, really first took hold. And, you know, minority populations from both cities emptied out and crossed the border to the other side. You know, as somebody put it, the violence only stopped when there was no one left to kill.

On August the 17th, details of the so-called Radcliffe Line are finally made public. It is confirmed that Lahore is now part of Pakistan. Only 30 miles away, Amritsar is now part of India. As many Hindus and Muslims find themselves on the wrong side of the line, the Sikhs are equally shocked. For them, Lahore is the sacred birthplace of Guru Nanak, the founder of their faith. And it's not just the cities that are volatile. Before standing down, Mountbatten established the Punjab Boundary Force to keep the peace in rural areas. But with a vast area to cover, its 50,000 men are the equivalent of just one soldier per square mile.

The violence of partition wasn't spontaneous in the sense that people didn't just suddenly wake up the day after independence and decide that they needed to kill their neighbor and, you know, grab a pitchfork or a sword and go across and do that. What happened was that there were these militias, ethnic gangs, essentially, that had organized, had been training with weapons, had been planning to commit violence in their minds, you know, in self-defense. And they would sort of go from village to village and gather much bigger groups of people. So you might have a gang of 50 people, but it would swell to a mob of 500 or 5,000.

Suddenly, this mob mentality takes over and people respond with brutality and egg each other on. And interviews you hear with people who took part in the violence, a lot of them say that they don't know what came over them. It was just like they were in some kind of daze, you know, just a bloodlust, essentially. And refugees who did escape and make it across the border would have these tales of this incredible violence. And that would inspire you know incredibly vicious

acts of revenge right it fueled a fury among people within days newspapers around the world are describing atrocities in rural areas troops respond to reports of violence but often arrive too late finding remote villages burnt to the ground, entire populations massacred. Three quarters of all partition deaths occur in the countryside. Even veteran World War II soldiers say the barbarity they witnessed during partition is unprecedented. The cycle of violence claims the lives of many women. Old women, pregnant women, young women. Rival communities invent new atrocities, each going one step further to terrorize the other into submission.

On top of the killing and mutilation, gangs kidnap thousands of women, carrying them away to become forced wives or slaves. or slaves. Partition was a gendered event. Of that there is no doubt. Women definitely bore the brunt of it in many different ways. The manner in which

the violence ensued, the amount of violence, the amount of abduction, rape, is horrifying. There were so many times I heard in interviews that it was better to jump in a well or kill yourself rather than be raped or come into the hands of an abductor, you know, or besmirching your honor. There are so many stories of women taking cyanide pills.

Women's honour was a really important part of their lives and their families in those days. So anything was better than you know, marring it. Amid the violence, many villages choose instead to stand their ground together. Mixed committees of

Hindus, Sikhs and and Muslims are formed, of men who served in the British Army in the recent World War. They establish training camps and send patrols to guard the whole village, including minority religion residents, against raiders. Innumerable stories emerge of neighbors helping one another. Some Muslim families shelter Sikh friends. Some Hindu families

adopt orphaned Muslim children. Elsewhere, Sikh warriors shed blood to prevent girls of any faith being abducted. But despite these efforts, more and more families realize that the best option is to leave. Many believe it will blow over in a few weeks when they will be able to come back. leave. Many believe it will blow over in a few weeks when they will be able to come back. They ask neighbors to look after their livestock, lock up their homes, bury valuables in the garden or under floorboards, and they leave with whatever they can carry. Some people left by road, by foot, by, you know, bullet cart. You know, those had the resources, started to leave by train. But, you know, the trains were attacked along the way, oftentimes when they pulled into a station. So a train full of Muslim refugees from the Indian side of the border would have to pass through Amritsar on its way to Lahore.

And as it pulled into the station, oftentimes gangs would board the train and massacre people there and then send the train across the border full you know, full of corpses and, you know, blood running onto the tracks. So it's a very vivid image of partition. I heard this story in Karachi of a woman traveling with her husband from Delhi to Lahore. And on the way, her husband got murdered on the train. And she couldn't bury him anywhere. So she had to leave his body on the side in some unknown village. And what she did was she took her shawl off and she soaked up all his blood. And when she got to Lahore, she buried that

blood soaked shawl in a grave. And she was pregnant at the time and she gave birth to a boy and she would bring the boy to the graveyard to introduce him to his father. There was another story I heard of a woman who had given birth on a train and they were passing a particularly dangerous area where everyone thought the baby may yell or shriek

and give them away. and she killed the child throughout august and september the military send refugees on long journeys in human caravans the columns stretch for 50 miles some Some families can afford carts, others walk, carrying children, old people or the sick. There are no services, no sanitation, no medical care. The caravan moves only 15 miles per day, so a journey of 200 miles or more may last weeks. But with very few troops to secure the route, out in the open, there's no defense against marauding gangs. They were incredibly vulnerable and would be attacked by gangs on horseback as they're

passing through desolate areas. And there are photographs of shallow graves all along these routes with arms sticking out of the ground, where dogs have been digging away at the earth to get at these corpses and so on. Canals full of bodies after an attack. So many, many, many more people were probably killed on the road than in the trains. Women die in childbirth on the road. Sick people succumb to illnesses. People starve to death. With no food or water and in desperation, some exhausted parents put down babies and toddlers by the side of the road and simply walk on. Other migrants report rescuing or walking past

abandoned infants. With resources so scarce, people drink water from paddy fields and rely on the occasional airdrop of food. People didn't know what the future held. They just, you know, were trying to escape with their lives and get across the border and then, you know, hope that they could reestablish themselves on the other side. And the governments, particularly the Pakistani government, were strained to the utmost trying to deal with this flood, right? I mean, they had barely

been established. It took several weeks before the militaries on both sides could really get this organized and get people funneled to the right places. Delhi is an interesting case because so many refugees made it there pretty early on, within the last half of August. And Delhi was not just any Indian city. This was the seat of government. And the government lost control of the city for several days. Nehru himself felt like he had lost control of the levers of government, that you know his own police wouldn't listen to him and there was a real moment at which it seemed possible that the governments in both sides of the border could collapse you know within weeks of partition some half a million hindus and sikhs

find their way to delhi 250 miles southeast of the border of Pakistan. Only weeks earlier, these refugees owned property and businesses. They tended homes and farms. Now, they have a tent on wasteland in a strange city where people speak a different language. In the north of the city center, a vast tract of land, comprising fruit farms and swampy areas, has been set aside for a new viceroy's house. The stream of incomers is channeled here. It becomes known as Kingsway Camp, the largest refugee settlement in Delhi. In some cases, things were a bit more structured.

For instance, when my paternal grandfather's family came to India, they first stopped at Amritsar. They went to a camp there, but they didn't know anybody. And they had also been separated from their family members. Over the next few days, they got news of some family in Delhi. So my grandfather's family goes from Malakwal to Mandi Bahautin to Amritsar to Delhi and arrives in this sprawling field where there are just tents, tents, tents, tents. And it was called Kingsway Camp. At the beginning, they lived in a tent with another family and over time got a concrete structure

called a barrack and stayed there for many, many years. And that's where my grandparents met, in a refugee camp, and they fell in love. Amid all the hardship and upheaval, life goes on. Politics also goes on. Mahatma Gandhi, the Indian Congress leader, is assassinated only six months after independence. His colleague Pandit Nehru is prime minister until his own death in office in 1964. Over in Pakistan, Muhammad Ali Jinnah serves only a year as prime minister. He succumbs to tuberculosis in September 1948, after a lifelong struggle with the disease. Mountbatten later comments that had he known

about Jinnah's precarious health, he might have delayed independence and tried to avoid partition, instead of rushing it through. As last Viceroy of India, Mountbatten leaves the country in June 1948 and returns to the British Navy. But he will suffer his own violent end when he is murdered by the terrorist organization the IRA, who blow up his boat off the Irish coast in 1979. Soon after partition in 1947, millions of migrants discover that they will never go home. Though some who survived the journey thrive in a new society that offers new opportunities, over 40,000 refugees, including the grandparents of our historian Anchal Malhotra,

will spend a decade living at Kingsway Camp. In 1951, a census carried out in India shows that over 7 million displaced persons, mainly Hindus and Sikhs, arrived from Pakistan. Pakistan counts almost the same number of Muslim migrants from India. There's a similar story in the now-divided Punjab, where around a quarter of the population from either side of the border flees their homes. But the official figures reveal another shocking fact. and a quarter of the population from either side of the border flees their homes. But the official figures reveal another shocking fact, an anomaly in the number of migrants

versus immigrants. By comparing the inflow and outflow, the census shows that 3.4 million of those forced to move during partition never arrived. They went missing. Around a million people die during partition, either due to violence or the terrible conditions during migration. The exact figure can never be known. It is also believed that up to 100,000 women and girls are abducted during the chaos. Several years ago, I spoke to a woman in a city called Jammu in India. And she had been abducted with her one-year-old son. And they had been carried deep into Pakistan on horses and kept for nearly a year until she was retrieved.

There was a retrieval program for women in India and Pakistan. And there was so much fear in her voice when she was telling the story. And she grasps my arm. I didn't think that she had so much strength in her, but she grasped my arm tightly and she said, there was a letter. In the years after I was returned, after partition, there was a letter that came with my name on it. And I was so terrified because I thought it was my abductor. And it could have just been like a bank letter.

It could have been anything, but she was so afraid that someone had found her that she said, I tore it up and threw it away. And I can feel her grasp. It was fearful. Imagine carrying that much fear, palpable fear, decades later. I think that is what it did to the emotional psyche of women. And of course, every story is different. There are stories of women who were retrieved that didn't want to go back,

who had made families now in either India or Pakistan, who had had children. There were stories of women who left children behind and went back. Only three weeks after independence, representatives from India and Pakistan first meet to discuss the importance of recovering abducted women. Between the years 1948 to 1956, a recovery operation was carried out by the governments of India and Pakistan, which sought to recover those women who had been abducted and forcibly converted during the upheaval of partition and restore them to their respective families and countries where they rightfully belonged, according to their religion.

And then in 1949, India passed the Abducted Persons Recovery and Restoration Act. And during the course of those operations, some 30,000 women were recovered, both Hindu women and Muslim women. Relatives of lost girls place adverts in newspapers, hoping to track them down. In rural areas, police act almost like bounty hunters, harassing communities to give up women from minority religions.

In other cases, the damage is already done. Some families refuse to accept the return of daughters who have been violated because they are no longer considered to be honorable. And with so many millions caught up in the chaos, it is inevitable that families get separated. Some must wait decades to be reunited with lost friends. As well as migrating all over India or Pakistan, others move overseas, putting more distance between families. In the case of people wanting to travel between India and Pakistan, there are also physical barriers in the form of barbed wire fences and visas for visitors.

For a long time, the curious descendants of those who lived through partition find that their elders lived behind a veil of silence, unwilling to discuss traumatic or shameful events. But with time, many people open up. It is August 2022 in Lahore. An old man stands under the shade of a tree beside a busy street. His name is Tilak and he is almost 90 years old. His granddaughter takes him by the arm and they walk together into a cafe. The place feels familiar, even though the menu offers sushi and burgers,

two things he'd never even heard of when he lived here 75 years ago. Although the city has changed, its soul remains the same. It is the first time Tilak has been back to Lahore since his family left in the middle of the night in 1947. But his granddaughter is interested in partition, so he agreed to come on this pilgrimage to his old home. She says she has a surprise for him, something she found on the internet. has a surprise for him, something she found on the internet. Tillak likes the internet because he can buy clothes and watch the cricket, but he prefers not to delve into the past. He has lived a whole life since partition.

He only hopes that the people he left behind got to live a good life too. Suddenly his granddaughter stands up to greet some newcomers. A man who speaks with a Canadian accent and a very old woman in a fashionable salwar kameez. She looks familiar and Tilak finds that his knees are wobbly when he stands. But she smiles and holds out a coin, a very shiny one rupee coin. Tilak takes it and closes his fist around it. This is Ameela, the young woman he left behind at the Hindu well 75 years before. He sees that his granddaughter is crying. The man who must be Ameela's grandson is crying, even the waitress he's never even met before is crying. But Tilaq and Ameela are smiling. He pulls out a chair so his old friend can sit.

He doesn't want to waste time on tears. They have a lifetime to catch up on. Though the characters of Tilak and Ermila are imagined, their story echoes hundreds of real-life testimonies told by survivors who waited decades to be reunited. Even today, families work tirelessly to find lost loved ones. One benefit of social media is the power to reconnect people separated by time and a line that was hastily drawn on a map. A few years ago, something called the Kartarpur Corridor opened, A few years ago, something called the Kartarpur Corridor opened,

which for the first time in history allowed Indians to go to Pakistan without a visa. So it's a non-visa trip. And basically it was for Sikhs because Kartarpur is a religious pilgrimage site. And it was for pilgrimage purposes that they opened it, but it was open to all people from anywhere. What happened was people who had been separated for decades began to meet in one place physically. Family members, there have been reunions of mothers and daughters, sisters and brothers, friends. And these videos that come out of Kartarpur, of hugging and laughing and singing and crying,

it should really tell you that people want to meet. And these are people that haven't seen each other for decades and they cannot believe the other is still alive. In addition to family and friends, migrants lost something that could never be replaced, a part of their identity. Partition defined people by religion alone, putting faith over and above other factors

like language, land and heritage. When people left their homelands, they left gravesites, farms, ancestral roots, the very soil on which their people had given birth, lived, and died. Today, after 75 years, the repercussions of partition mean that many people are still in conflict over disputed lands. The roots of the divide between India and Pakistan go back to partition. And that divide, that border, is arguably one of the most dangerous places in the world today. So this hostility between them has led to several wars,

continuing conflict in Kashmir. It has spurred the development of two of the fastest growing nuclear arsenals in the world. It has encouraged the Pakistani military over many years to support militant groups that they have used to essentially to bleed the Indians in Kashmir, which have also developed their own ties to groups like al-Qaeda. It led Pakistan to support the Taliban in Afghanistan, again, as a hedge against Indian influence there. So the threat of a nuclear war breaking out or of a terrorist group somehow seizing a nuclear weapon,

while small, are probably greater in this part of the world than anywhere else. And that is because of the hostilities that began in partition. You know, the sort of chaos and blood and violence and hate that spread over a few weeks and months in 1947 are still having repercussions today. I carry soil for so many people I've interviewed. When I come from India, people are like, if you go to this village, please bring me some soil. I don't think anyone who has never lost their home will really truly understand what it feels like to be completely severed from it. You know, a woman I interviewed in Pakistan remembered her village in Samana in Punjab, Indian Punjab. And she said, that's my

home. And her granddaughter said, how is that possible? You've lived in Pakistan for 70 years. You've lived in India only for 10. Obviously, Pakistan is your home. And she says, home is home. Soil is soil. Next time on Short History Off, we'll bring you a short history of the Mona Lisa. Every single event is as if some kind of film director or a PR agency said, how do we make this painting the best known in the world? So someone says, well, let's have intellectuals talking about it. Well, let's have someone steal it.

Well, let's have Picasso steal it. Let's have, and on and on and on. And in fact, all these things happen more or less coincidentally. That's next time on Short History Of.