Partition of India

Virginia SOL

WG.9     The student will analyze the characteristics of the regions of South Asia and Southeast Asia by

a. identifying and analyzing the location of major geographic regions and major cities on maps and globe;

b. describing major physical and environmental features and how geography may change over time;

c. analyzing cultural influences and landscapes; and

d. explaining important economic characteristics, including the distribution of economic activities and global trade.

"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." 

Leaving in a Hurry: How the British's Haste Led to a Violent Partition

After dramatically changing the socio-cultural landscape of India, the British left due to inadequate funds to continue their colonization of India, approving the divide of the Indian subcontinent based on religious divides. This irresponsible method left India in religious and political polarization and economic insecurity, leaving people to react violently under the influence of unjust discrimination and indoctrination of imperialist ideology.  

PBS: Finding Your Roots Series 

The Bloody Legacy of Indian Partition _ The New Yorker.pdf
The Partition_ The British game of ‘divide and rule’.pdf

"Many writers persuasively blame the British for the gradual erosion of these shared traditions. As Alex von Tunzelmann observes in her history “Indian Summer,” when “the British started to define ‘communities’ based on religious identity and attach political representation to them, many Indians stopped accepting the diversity of their own thoughts and began to ask themselves in which of the boxes they belonged." - "The Great Divide"


The Partition of India in 1947

The British Perspective on Partition and How Dominant Voices Can Change Reality

The National Archives of the UK provides educational material through British documents that detail the partition of India in 1947, explaining the facts and how historical and seemingly "reliable" documents have their own biases. 

Personal Stories During Partition 

The 1947 Partition Archive also has an interactive StoryMap in which users can learn about the different stories shared based in regions on their experiences with the Partition of 1947. Below are video segments of oral histories on the partition. 

Poetry on Partition

Tanzila Ahmed

Written after Langston Hughes’ “How Bout it, Dixie” in which Hughes connects the black freedom struggle in the United States to the anti-colonial freedom struggle in the subcontinent:


If you believe
In the Four Freedoms, too,
Then share ’em with me —
Don’t keep ’em all for you.


Show me that you mean
Democracy, please —
Cause from Bombay to Georgia
I’m beat to my knees.


You can’t lock up Gandhi,
Club Roland Hayes,
Then make fine speeches
About Freedom’s ways.

Fatimah Asghar


Partition

Ullu partitions the apartment in two—
a thin blue wall cutting the deserted hall
Toys & books on our side ,


refrigerator, sink & TV with our Auntie A.
She sends us rations throughout the day & we stay
separate, not allowed to cross. I’m 10


& haven’t been hugged in a long time.
Allah made a barrier between me & my mom.
Ullu makes a barrier between me & my aunt.


When he leaves we sit at the base of the blue wall
& I laugh loud so Auntie A knows
I’m alive & okay & she laughs loud so I know


she hasn’t left & we sit like this for hours, hands
pressed to the felt, laughing, laughing,
unable to see each other.

Partition and its Impact in the US: A Connection from William & Mary 

Veena Kapur, a 1968 William & Mary graduate, detailed growing up after partition in the generation differences in views of Hindu-Muslim relations and how she came to view the relationship growing up and settling in the United States in an oral history interview with the APM Research Project. 

Veena Kapur, 1968

"I lived with my grandmother [in India]. My maternal grandmother. And there were other cousins in that same house. My family originally was from Pakistan. I was born in India, But they moved and my father who was working in India at that time, moved his family, and my mother's family. My grandmother, whose husband had just died, said, "I've lived here all my life. I'm coming back, and she just took a picture of my grandfather and some change of clothes and left, and they were pretty wealthy. So, she became very bitter about Pakistanis and Muslims. So I was there and going to a day school there called Saint Mary's also run by nuns. And I wasn't the most obedient kid. So I would get into trouble. But I was smart. So they couldn't do too much to me. But I would like, protest against only learning about the colonial history because I thought that wasn't fair and they shouldn't have been here anyway. And all of that. Ok. And so, and I had a very good close friend, Muslim friend, and I wanted to go to their house and my grandmother said, “No, you can't go to a Muslim person's house.” You know, she was very prejudiced, which was, and then my mother was visiting, she would come periodically, and she said, “Of course she can.” So that's how I went."

Dr. Kapur's story touches on the uprooting of her family after the partition and how this forced relocation stirred unjust anger in different communities. 

"When I got married, we met in a music class, my husband and I; he was from a Catholic University. But we didn't meet; he was doing his Ph.D. in engineering. And so we met in a music class, and that's how we connected, and we got married, and he's from now what was then East Pakistan, now Bangladesh. He actually took a year off his thesis so that he could protest for the foundation of Bangladesh. You know, I know. But it's very interesting because some people who, one of my friends whose husband had lost family members in the partition, was very against Muslims.

So he wouldn't come to the wedding here. My mother went and said, but at least his wife came. I was very close to her and it was like, you know, come on, why are you using religion to divide people? You know. And in fact, I've raised my kids to be respectful of all religions. They had friends who went to, who had bar and bat Mitzvahs and I wouldn't let them go to the party without going to the services.

So and then we would go to Cedars with friends. And so, we had a nanny who was from Indonesia; she was Muslim. And one day, she was looking very sad, and I said, “What's going on?” She was like a family member. We loved her, and she said, "Well, I have to go to the mosque for Eid, and everybody brings their kids. You've got, I don't have any." I said "You've got two here, take them.""