From Website: " In 1997, after four years as a BBC correspondent based in Delhi, I had the enviable opportunity of making a radio series for the BBC World Service to mark the fiftieth anniversary of India's and Pakistan's independence. India: a people partitioned sought to be a social history of Partition: not about the high politics of independence, nor about the British Raj and those who upheld it, but about the lived experience of the millions who were caught up in the Partition whirlwind.

Color held a contested status in relation to the discursive and affective entanglement of art and Indian nationalism. Examination of the artworks, speeches, manifestos, and musings of Mohandas K. Gandhi, Abanindranath and Rabindranath Tagore, Nandalal Bose, and Jamini Roy shows how color could be "redeemed" from the disciplinary straitjacket of the British colonial art school. Construed by Indian nationalists as both cosmopolitan and fundamental, color (in terms of its materiality and political resonance) became critical to the formation of a Bengali aesthetic.

This website collects “educational resources about the histories and experiences of the 1947 Partition of India in order to create new knowledge about the transnational effects of ethnic violence and migration in the modern world.”

From scoopwhoop.com: After gaining independence from British Raj, India was to be divided into two separate countries (India and Pakistan). A major population exchange happened with around 25 million people relocating to their new homes and what followed was complete chaos. A large evil loomed over the population that was shifting to a new country once the borders were drawn. Religious riots along with acts of oppression and cruelty marked this huge event as a dark blot on the history of the two countries.

With the passing decades, nationalist fervor and mutual suspicion have largely replaced memories of mass death and displacement during the chaotic cleaving of Pakistan from India.

Abstract: The historiography on the Partition of Bengal has tended to see it as a culmination of long-term trends of Hindu and Muslim communalism within the province. This essay offers a counter-narrative to the ‘inevitability’ of the Partition by focusing on Bengali public discourse in the months leading up to the Partition.

The cities of Lahore Pakistan and Amaritsar India suffered widespread destruction and demographic transformation in the wake of armed invasion and the later partition in 1951. Ten million Punjabis were uprooted. In all, around 13 million people were displaced by partition. Talbot examines the impact of partition on the cities and their inhabitants during the post-partition decade of 1947-1957

This paper revisits the violent annexation of the erstwhile princely state of Hyderabad by the Indian army in 1948 as an inaugural moment of dispossession to reconstruct Hyderabad's twentieth century past along the axes of Muslim belonging and memory. I argue that we must situate twentieth and twenty-first century Hyderabadi Muslim migration in relation to Partition-related displacements and attempts to overcome them through economic conditions provided by migration.

Bangladesh, with significant dependence on foreign aid after Independence especially for relief and reconstruction purposes, has diversified aid inflows over time to meet the country's increasing development needs. Foreign aid, particularly to the education sector, has,however, declined over the years. This paper examines the fluctuations in aid inflows to the education sector in Bangladesh vis-à-vis the country's domestic spending in education.

Abstract: Fear is one of the primary emotions and state of psychological being which affects the physical existence of human being. Literature dealing with holocaust, partition or physicalviolence also highlights the dimension of fear. Victims are always under the siege of psychological trauma that devastates their human existence.

In 1971, the Bengalis of East Pakistan had to stand up against the West Pakistani military junta's indiscriminate attacks and declare independence. However, until today, the Pakistani government has not apologised for its crimes against humanity and there are a small number of people in Bangladesh who do not consider the crackdown on 25 March 1971 a wrongful act. It seems that some people of the country are still not sure about how to characterise the liberation war of Bangladesh.

Built from the ground up by three thousand Sikh and Hindu refugees in the aftermath of the Partition of India in 1947, the town of Nilokheri in East Punjab emerged as an unlikely centre of agricultural education and scientific exchange. With support from the Ford Foundation, Indian and American scientists and development planners worked through the 1950s to transform the refugee township into a model of agricultural innovation and community development.

"The exhibition marks the acquisition by the T. Harry Williams Center for Oral History at LSU of a series of taped interviews -- conducted by Professors Frank de Caro and Rosan Augusta Jordan of the LSU English Department -- with British people who lived and worked in India before Independence in 1947. Collectively they provide a sort of "self-portrait" of a colonial subculture and accounts of how Europeans experienced a great Asian society under the peculiar conditions of their time. Quotations from the interviews have been included for each section of the exhibition.

Extracts from a military report on the Calcutta riots.

It won’t be an exaggeration to say that agony flows through the arteries and veins of Sindhis in place of blood. The greatest blow of them all, the partition of India brought with it a series of tragedies.

A commentary and analysis of the 1947 Partition from Dr. Chester. "Drawing from her dissertation, she considers here the background to timely questions associated with the Kashmir dispute. She raises the policy question of partition as a tool for crisis management or resolution, and she provides useful historical evidence for scholars wishing to draw contemporary lessons."

"This critical biography of Indu Mitha, a Pakistani dancer and choreographer, lays out an alternate, creative history of sixty-four years of post-Partition Pakistan. Her life and work enable choreographing an occluded space on stage and beyond, which I call space of hope --a space of alterity, a place where narratives countering the nation state boundaries enforced by the 1947 Partition of British India into the three independent states of Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh (1971). This space is not a post-colonial one, but is based on a longer shared historical specificity of South Asia.

This paper unearths an alternative paradigm through which to consider the discussions and debates between members of the Indian public, government bureaucrats and Congress Party politicians about the rights and interests of Indian citizens both before and immediately after India's Independence in 1947. It argues that much of the recent historical work on citizenship during this period has been preoccupied with issues of nationality and religious community as a result of the fallout from Partition.

"This is a copy of a letter from Winston Churchill to Clement Attlee, 1 July 1947.Clement Attlee was the Prime Minister of the Labour Government that drew up plans to grant independence to India. Churchill was the leader of the opposition Conservative Party and was deeply worried about the plans. He objected to the use of the term ‘Independence’ because the new legislation was supposed to grant India and Pakistan dominion status. This meant that they recognised the British King, George VI, as their head of state and that Britain would retain some influence over the country.

"The relevance of a study of Partition fiction can hardly be over-emphasised. A focussed critical assessment of this fiction becomes necessary given the considerable fictional output that has thematised the Partition - and the paucity of critical attention devoted to it. An assessment of this kind is also relevant because it is likely to usher in a process of self-introspection and self-knowledge, both at the level of the individual and the community.

The image of "Mother India" has often been used to represent the nation, but within this image the relationship of women to the nation does not find a place. The question of where a woman belongs is one that has many answers but these are hardly ever related to nationhood. This article looks at how nation and nationhood have been defined in women's writings in India. It attempts to explore this through two main themes: first, narratives of partition, specifically those written by women across the border and second, the dominant perceptions reflected in women's writings.

This article examines what is arguably a paradox: given the unique position held by the events of the 1947 Partition in the collective consciousness of the Indian subcontinent, why is there no national partition museum anywhere in India? The article analyses the possible reasons for this absence, evaluates the arguments for establishing such a museum, and considers what shape it might take.

This paper uses the Partition narratives of Sylheti bhodrolok refugees from East Bengal to show that these people were displaced without experiencing direct violence or violent expulsions. Based primarily on personal accounts, using memories as well as local postcolonial texts, it tries to shed some light on a category of migrants so far marginalized in Partition historiography. The attempt here is not to point out the great inconsistencies between Partition theory and reality, but to try and identify what was 'local' about the migration to Assam.

6/30/2015

Defining the relationship between displaced populations and the nation state is a fraught historical process. The Partition of India in 1947 provides a compelling example, yet markedly little attention has been paid to the refugee communities produced. Using the case of the displaced ‘Urdu-speaking minority’ in Bangladesh, this article considers what contemporary discourses of identity and integration reveal about the nature and boundaries of the nation state.

While the library of scholarship that engages with the cultural representation of the 1947 India/Pakistan partition is immense, the specific genre of theatre has been surprisingly under-examined. This chapter aims to redress this balance through a focus on a selection of Anglophone plays which deal with partition. In this chapter, I argue that a useful lens to study these plays through is that of farce. Although the plays do not always follow the generic rules of farce to any great degree, they do often aim to construct a narrative of partition as itself a farcical event.

In 1978, several hundred Bengali refugees in Morichjhanpi, one of the northern-most forested islands of the Sundarbans, were brutally evicted by the authorities for violating the Forest Acts. This paper looks at how the memory of Morichjhanpi was evoked by the islanders to reveal their resentment about the unequal distribution of resources between them and the Royal Bengal tigers of the Sundarbans reserve forest.

Much of the scholarship on Bangladesh’s founding places it within a narrative of repetition. It either repeats the partitions of 1905 or 1947 or the creation of India and Pakistan as postcolonial states. This paper argues instead for the novelty of Bangladesh’s creation against the postcolonial state, suggesting that it opened up a new history at the global level in which decolonisation was replaced by civil war as the founding narrative for new states.

Abstract: In this paper we shall explore the move from localised to politicised identities in Bengalisociety and evidence how religious affiliation became a central consideration within thisshift. Te growth of communalism, we shall argue, has much to do with the colonialstrategy of establishing separate electoral systems for Hindus and Muslims, cementingthe separation between these religious groupings.

History’s silence resonates in the textual silence of the Indian Constitution on the immense scale of violence and exodus accompanying the partition of the subcontinent, despite the contemporaneity of partition and constitution writing. Clearly discernible on a closer reading of the Constituent Assembly's debates are implicit influences of partition on key constitutional decisions, such as citizenship, political safeguards for religious minorities and provisions creating a strong central tendency in the union.

This paper will examine poetic responses to the trauma of Partition, and will consider both poetry written at the time and since. I will examine works in Bengali, Urdu and English, by such poets as Agha Shahid Ali, Jibanananda Das, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, and Achintya Kumar Sengupta. I will examine how poets deal with the memory of the violence and the resulting legacy of dislocation and alienation. I will examine the possibilities of poetic melancholy as a tool in order to respond to and negotiate the enforced and violent change in identities that Partition precipitated.

The Partition of India (1947) is commonly understood as a violent territorial and political separation of peoples, their forced evictions and migration as well as communal upheavals. But India's Partition can be seen as something more than separation of communities and the creation of distinct national identities. This paper suggests that refugee rehabilitation, one of the important processes of the post-Partition years, formed the rubric through which we remember 1947.

The Bengali sufferers of the tragic partition of India in 1947 have arguably failed to garner the political, policy, and discursive attention received by their West Pakistani or Punjabi counterparts. A case in point, Chittaranjan Park – a sub-urban neighborhood or colony of New Delhi granted as a ghetto to the Bengalis rendered rootless by the formation of East Pakistan – is rarely a muse for forays in partition studies or borderscaping.

In Sathyu’s film, both the Muslim and Hindu characters are examples of tolerance, kindness and restraint.

Women's lives in the Punjab, hitherto regulated by strictly set patriarchal norms, saw unexpected and almost drastic change as Partition set in. The motif of Partition has centred on the humiliation and trauma that women encountered and witnessed. While it is true that women were, in countless instances, Partition's ubiquitous victims, in very many ways the chaos and temporality of the post-Partition period allowed several of them to redefine themselves anew.

Abstract: India has had a very different history of violence and conflict from South Africa's, yet each democracy has had to face questions of how to deal with memories of past suffering, which bear directly on the quality of political life in the present. In India, the dream of national independence in 1947 rapidly changed into a nightmare of religious and ethnic violence. Britain's empire in the sub-continent was divided into two countries, Muslim-based Pakistan and constitutionally secular India, amid horrific massacres of Muslims, Hindus, and Sikhs.

This article makes an historical analysis of Pakistani Kashmir policy between 1947-88. Besides providing a synoptic view of the Kashmir policies, pursued by various regimes in Pakistan both civilian and military also provides a thorough insight into all the major developments concerning Kashmir dispute as well as the responses of Pakistani governments’ visà- vis these developments. It contextualizes these main planks of Pakistan’s Kashmir policy by situating historical factors which invariably shaped its main contours.

The community’s many losses and the distortion of their history is only now being acknowledged.

Staged inside a shamiyana (tent-house), the video-installation Five Rivers: A Portrait of Partition, a documentary in cyclorama by Sheba Remy Kharbanda and William Charles ‘Chuck’ Moss narrates Amrik Singh’s personal account of the 1947 Partition of the subcontinent into India and Pakistan. The Partition Scholarship is largely divided into the narratives based on ‘high politics’ and ‘voices from below’.

Abstract:This paper seeks to analyse the causes of sectarianviolence against women which are rooted in the history of the partition of the country during independence and patriarchalattitudes which continue to dominate society. That this violencewas gendered is a fact largely ignored by recorded historyalthough it appears as a recurrent theme in the fictional narrativesof the partition.

From website:"This is a portal to educational sources available in the India Office Records on the historical event of Indian Independence, 1947."

From their Resource Center on South Asian History, "South Asia has suffered from several mis-portrayals that have reduced the understanding of its historical development to the spiritual realm, whereas in fact, the region has made several contributions in the areas of science, technology, art and literature, and prior to the colonial period, it was a major world supplier of high quality pre-industrial manufactures. Here are links to various articles covering different period of its history."

This paper assesses India's decision to intervene militarily in Bangladesh's War of Independence in 1971. It explores the various arguments - shared ethnicity, irredentist tendencies, lack of international involvement, and the need to tip the balance of power against Pakistan-to understand the motivations behind India's apparent aggressive behaviour, as deemed by the international community at the time.

Legal and political considerations make flouting the Indus Water Treaty easier said than done.

The Choices Program is a non-profit organization based at Brown University that develops curricula on current and historical international issues. Course materials place special emphasis on the importance of educating students in their participatory role as citizens. This particular curriculum focuses on Indian Independence and the Partition of 1947.

This chapter shows how Partition interrupted lines of communication and trade affecting India’s literary culture, and argues that books and reading function in Indian Partition literature as a means of moving beyond trauma. Contexts include colonial cartography and pre-Partition literary culture as well as relocated bookshops and research libraries during Partition.

Abstract: The disputed status of Jammu and Kashmir represents the unfinished business of the Partition of India and Pakistan. This essay examines how claims to Kashmir by India, Pakistan, the All Parties Hurriyat Conference (APHC) and the Kashmiri Pandits influence usage of the term ‘Kashmiriyat’ (i.e. the ethos of being Kashmiri). The term is frequently invoked with inconsistent meaning. Kashmiriyat is analysed, through linguistic and semiotic theories of the ‘empty signifier’, to identify which groups are present and absent within sociopolitical discourses.

An online archive of an exhibit held May 2, 2009 at the Braunstone Civic Centre focusing on The Legacy of Partition, 1947-2009.

Within patriarchal structures, women are often considered as embodiments of the honor of the whole community. Accordingly, in times of ethnic, religious or other violent conflict, they become major targets. Rape has always been a potent weapon of war in humiliating and emasculating the enemy. This Factsheet provides a glimpse into the magnitude and nature of the sexual violence that was unleashed during the Partition of the Indian Subcontinent in 1947 and the issues that germinated from it.

According to Police Special Branch intelligence reports, amidst the chaos of Partition, over 60,000 ounces of gold were stolen from fleeing Hindus and Sikhs in 1947. Alongside political identity and religious organisation and territorialisation, desire for wealth or property was a key trigger for the continuation of the Partition violence. This article documents organised communal violence which erupted in the NWFP and Punjab during 1946–47 using largely underutilised police and intelligence reports from the period. The empirical focus of the article is two-fold.

The Enlightenment as the origin of modernity and as the foundation of moral universalism has been much invoked by social theory in recent years especially by writers influenced by Michel Foucault's essay on the subject. Postmodernism and cultural anthropology have made the question about Enlightenment universalism ever more pressing. At one level the issue is very simple.

Official report by India’s Ministry of Information on population movements.

A review of the book, "Jinnah: His Successes, Failures and Role in History" by Ishtiyaq Ahmed

By advocating fearlessness, invoking a sense of responsibility and discoursing at an ethical moral plane, Gandhi prioritised his ideological fight against the ideology that had created the circumstances in which violence of this kind took place. He understood, from the very beginning, that the hegemony of communal ideology was partially a reflection of the socio economic structure of that society. And this was quite significant because his own earlier understanding of communalism was not as focused as it was beginning to look like now.

Abstract: Much has been written on Hindu nationalism in the past few years. Indeed, the rapid ascendancy of the Hindu Right has been the focus of attention of numerous scholars from a wide variety of disciplines. What remains neglected thus far is the role of recent migrations from Bangladesh, increasingly characterized in popular parlance as ‘infiltration’. The present paper aims to rectify this situation.

"As the country waves flags and celebrates the 75th anniversary of India’s independence, it is also time to take stock. What did India’s founders and citizens dream of, how has India fared, what have been our challenges and successes?

The Wire’s reporters and contributors bring stories of the period, of the traumas but also the hopes of Indians, as seen in personal accounts, in culture, in the economy and in the sciences. How did the modern state of India come about, what does the flag represent? How did literature and cinema tackle the trauma of Partition?"

This website page provides a summary of events that lead Pakistan to Partition in 1947. More historical information about Pakistan can also be found.

Abstract: Postcolonialism, as a discipline and approach, offers an analytical lens through which to investigate problems in formerly colonized states of Africa and South Asia, along with a poststructuralist perspective on culture and discourse on politics of representation. Pakistan is one such former colony where postcolonial narratives and the persistence of colonial legacies such as the Frontier Crimes Regulations (FCR), on its periphery of Pashtun-dominated tribal areas of FATA, has contributed to growing instability in the region.

From The National Archives: The National Archives has recorded the narratives of four Panjabi elders uprooted from their homeland during the Partition of British India in 1947. At least 18 million people were uprooted and one million died in the mass migration that followed. In 2010, Jaswant, Mohammed, Reginald and Tilak Raj met at The National Archives to describe how Partition had shaped their lives.

This is a Partition-Independence that we have not always faced up to in our history-writing and our public presentations of that moment of 'liberation'. A focus on the Muslims of a disturbed and high-profile place such as Delhi in 1947-48 allows us to recover something of the suppressed memories of Partition and Independence, at the same time as we ask something about the way in which the history of these events has been written up.

One planned a year and a half back to record the memories of the elderly persons who witnessed the Partition of India and bore it on their souls. The untold tales of the painful migration of 1947 should reach the common man. We have preserved on YouTube channel called ‘Partition Diary’ the stories of nearly 100 old men who now live in various places of Bahawalnagar and Pakpattan districts of Punjab (Pakistan).

Intro from BBC: The 60th anniversary of the partition of India in 1947 and the birth of Pakistan was a momentous event in the region.
Millions of people found themselves on the wrong side of the border and hundreds of thousands lost their lives during the mass migration and communal bloodshed.

Generations of families, whose lives have been shaped by the partition, look back at the traumatic events of 1947 and the impact they had on the following 60 years.

An index of selected sources on the Partition of 1947.

An academic work. (PhD Thesis) Abstract from the author: India’s Partition was an event of momentous significance for the three major communities, the Hindus, Muslims and the Sikhs who were at the time residing in the subcontinent. It was an equally important phenomenon for the British who were to withdraw their rule and thereby signify an imperial retreat from India. Independence was announced on the 15th of August 1947 after which the two sovereign States of India and Pakistan emerged on the map of the world.

The Journal of Asian Studies
Vol. 73, No. 2 (MAY 2014), pp. 309-312 (4 pages)

A pair of earrings is not all I inherited from my grandparents. They also left me their stories of grief and hope.

"Few events have been more important to the history of modern South Asia than the partition of the subcontinent into India and Pakistan in 1947. The coming of partition has cast a powerful shadow on historical reconstructions of the decades before 1947, while the ramifications of partition have continued to leave their mark on subcontinental politics fifty years after the event.

Abstract: During the 1947 Partition of India, an estimated 75,000 to 100,000 women were abducted by members of other religious communities – to be raped and murdered, sold into prostitution, or forced into marriage. In response to this crisis, the governments of India and Pakistan initiated a bilateral recovery programme whose objective it was to return ‘abducted persons’ to their natal or conjugal families. Over the last decade or so, however, criticism of this programme has become increasingly vociferous.

This website features "the 36 photographs from India post-independence that have been digitalized in this collection were found in 2002, in a manila envelope, while cleanin gout a file cabinet used for storage. Since then the photographs have been housed in the Preservation Department at the University of Hawai'i Library."

An academic article. Abstract form author: The history of the struggle for independence and partition of India from British stronghold needs an authentic and objective analysis not only of the course that it followed or the humanistic perspective that it developed but the sheer manner in which it was planned by the departing authorities. It was not the act but the way it was performed that has brought a whole aura of negativism to be associated with such a historic episode leading many to state and believe that it was a mistake.

Jacques Rancière defined the "distribution of the sensible" as the effect of a type of aesthetico-political decision-making that creates a partitioning of the realm of the perceivable in relation to both art and society.

“Postcolonial Studies @ Emory is a student-authored project in (perpetual) progress at the English Department at Emory University. Begun in Spring 1996, it aims to furnish introductory level information on important creative and critical figures and significant topics in Postcolonial Studies.” Featured on this site is a study of the 1947 Partition of India and it includes a detailed timeline of events that occurred.

A story of how Partition ripped families apart, and inflected everlasting damage. Bhatia shares a story of how a sister, who lives in India, cannot see her brother who live in Pakistan.

A website project collecting recollection of people who were direct witnesses to the impact of partition. This project examines the stories of four people who were directly impacted by the partition of India; either as being a migrant, or as a person who lived next to the refugee camps, and was directly impacted by the mass inflow of refugees.

This article explores key developments in the way Partition has been represented in the history of India and Pakistan. It more specifically examines how alternative silent voices have been become more visible in the past fifteen years in the historiography of Partition. This shift has been made possible with the use of oral testimonies to document accounts of ordinary people's experiences of this event in the history of India and Pakistan.

In 2005 Rev. Michael Roden, the vicar at Church of England church of St Mary’s in Hitchin (a small town about 30 miles north of London) was invited to India to give a series of sermons to Indian Church of England congregations. He was struck during his visit by the scars in Indian society that he thought were the remnants of Partition’s aftermath. His visit set him thinking about the ways in which Partition has shaped British as well as Indian and Pakistani society, and about how little people in the UK know about the calamitous results of British policy at the time of decolonization.

This chapter explores Sindhi Partition refugees’ experiences of settlement and adaptation in India, with emphasis on Sindhi women’s experiences. Women’s refugee histories are often marginal to mainstream discourse, although refugee experiences and subjectivities are deeply gendered. Sindhi women in particular have been relegated to the periphery – both in histories of Partition as well as scholarship on the wider Sindhi diaspora.

The memorialisation of the Partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947 through popular cinema is the theme of this paper. Both in India and Pakistan, cinema as a cultural production wields immense influence in the lives of the people and mainstream cinema has been deeply affected by Partition.

Abstract: As the supreme leader of the Indian national movement for freedom, the success of which in 1947 set off a whole wave of decolonization in the rest of the British Empire, M. K. Gandhi may be thought to have a claim to be regarded as the Father of the Postcolonial. However, the founding figures of postcolonial discourse have hardly taken any note of him, and there is a deafening silence on Gandhi in the various readers, encyclopedias and companions on the subject.

Secretary of State’s comments on India policy for British Ambassador in Washington.

A story of how "Sikhs and Hindus across rural Punjab are helping restore mosques destroyed during Partition."

Abstract:Millions of people were forced to migrate after the Partition of the Indian subcontinent. Themassive human displacement enabled the creation of new ethnic identities. This was, especially,pronounced for migrant Muslims in Pakistan who had to settle there and restart their lives. Althoughinitially, they were regarded as religious refugees who had sacrificed everything for Pakistan, soonthey were treated as unwanted outsiders.

The South Asian Citizens Web “aims to promote dialogue and information exchange between and about South Asian citizens initiatives.” It features resources and articles on the 1947 Partition of India.

Translation of article from Red Star newspaper published in the Soviet Union.

Summary: India's partition was intended to create a strong, homogeneous nation, capable of being governed effectively from the centre, a goal which could be achieved only by excising from India its Muslim-majority regions. In a parallel but differently motivated campaign, the Hindus who pressed for Bengal's partition wanted to cut out territories in which Muslims were a threatening majority, even if this meant sacrificing the economic viability of their new province. But these partitions were inevitably incomplete.

This paper tries to lay bare the intertwined histories of rehabilitation of the refugees from East
Pakistan and the development of the city of Calcutta in the initial decades after the partition of
British India. Calcutta has attracted people from outside from its inception. Calcutta of the late eighteenth century has been described as a ‘contact zone’, where people from various fields and
countries, of varied descent, came to the city with their specific knowledge practices.1
With the

Abstract: While the partition of the Indian subcontinent, as an event of shattering consequence, underlies the very origin of the postcolonial Indian state, historiographies of Indian nationhood are often marked by their failure to acknowledge or claim this cataclysmic history.

Attlee's statement of 3 June heralded success for the coalition of Bengal's Hindu leaders who, in the last years of the Raj, had campaigned so vigorously for the partition of their province. By decisions taken in London and in Delhi, they had won for themselves a Hindu state inside India which would be in place before the end of the monsoon. With this prize in imminent prospect, the leaders of the Hindu coalition had to turn their attention to the practical details of converting, by mid-August, their idea of a Hindu homeland into reality.

The Bangladesh War of Independence, in terms of its human and economic experience, lasted only nine months. Still, it forever changed the character, pace and prospects of economic life in Bangladesh. When it ended, the economy was left prostrate; fortunes had been swept away and much of the capital stock was destroyed or in disrepair. This paper provides a systematic accounting of all these direct and indirect costs, as well as their impact on post-war economic life.

An academic work, (PhD Thesis). Abstract from the author: This dissertation will focus on the history of bilateral relations between India and Pakistan. It looks at how the process of dealing with issues thrown up in the aftermath of partition shaped relations between the two countries. I focus on the debates around the immediate aftermath of partition, evacuee property disputes, border and water disputes, minorities and migration, trade between the two countries, which shaped the canvas in which the India-Pakistan relationship took shape.

The partition of the Indian Subcontinent 70 years ago, when the British rule ended in August 1947, has generated much interest in the American and British press and television recently. Surprisingly, there has not been any significant discussion on the matter in Bangladesh.

In April 1950, the prime ministers of India and Pakistan met in Delhi to sign the landmark inter-dominion agreement known as the Nehru-Liaquat Pact, according to which India and Pakistan would be accountable to one another for the treatment of minorities in their countries. This agreement was the outcome of a mutual necessity for both governments to regulate the unchecked movement of minority population across the border, which led them into an unlikely—though nonetheless structurally integral—position of compromise and dialogue.

"From an India Office Military Department file. Report on the operations of the Punjab Boundary Force by its Commander, Major-General T W Rees. The Punjab Boundary Force was formed in a largely vain attempt to control and prevent communal warfare between Sikhs and Muslims in the Punjab at the time of the partition of British India into the two independent states of India and Pakistan. It operated 1 Aug - 1 Sep 1947."

The main focus of the The Arts and Cultural Heritage Trust is to set up a Partition Museum. The Partition Museum Project (TPMP) was initiated by The Arts and Cultural Heritage Trust (TAACHT), in early 2015, to work towards the establishment of a world class, physical museum, dedicated to the memory of the Partition in 1947 — its victims, its survivors and its lasting legacy. In one of the greatest and most painful upheavals of contemporary history, over twenty million migrated to a new homeland on the other side of a quickly demarcated border, leaving behind precious memories.

Partition and post-colonial migrations—sometimes voluntary, often forced— have created borders in South Asia that serve to oppress rather than protect. Migrants and refugees feel that their real homes lie beyond the borders, and liberation struggles continue the quest for freedoms that have proved to be elusive for many. States scapegoat refugees as “outsiders” for their own ends, justifying the denial of their rights, while academic discourse on refugees represents them either as victims or as terrorists.

The Partition of India was one of the crucial moments marking the transition between the colonial and postcolonial era. Partition has become ever since a long-term process that continues to elicit political, cultural and emotional contexts in South Asia. The creation of Pakistan as a homeland for South Asian Muslims involved the division of Bengal and Punjab along religious lines and while the celebratory narratives of decolonization and nationhood marked the official historiographies of 1947, trauma, loss and displacement were not part of the narrative.

From website: "Explore The Story of India through this interactive photo gallery that weaves together a series of interrelated themes, events, and individuals that helped shape India's history."

The process of partition between India and Pakistan, that is, dividing up material assets, remains an under-written subject, barring its border-building aspects. While the old scholarship offered an adversarial account of this exercise, the recent attempts revise this narrative by stressing upon the cooperation evinced by the two sides. Where the former found antagonism, the latter has sought to locate some mutually agreed method in the madness.

A comparative analysis on states that experienced partition, specifically Cyprus, India, Palestine, and Ireland.

This study examines the hazards of democracy promotion in multi-ethnic societies. I begin by developing a simple formal model, which isolates the main features of the strategic context of democracy promotion that can trigger ethnic conflict. The key intuition of the model is that democracy promotion creates a commitment problem between ethnic majorities and minority groups that are demographically over-represented in the coercive forces of the authoritarian regime that has been removed to install democracy.

"In April 2018, I was invited to the University of Rajshahi, Bangladesh, to deliver a talk at an international seminar on the Bangladesh Liberation War. While preparing for the talk, as an Indian youth born 15 years after the war in a village near India’s border with Bangladesh, I wondered what qualified me to speak on the war and that too in Bangladesh.

"Summary: Bangladesh's existence as a nation-state only dates from 1971, but the nation cannot be understood without reference to a much-longer historical backdrop. In this chapter we provide a selective historical overview leading up to the moment when Bangladesh emerged as a separate country, aiming to contextualise analysis of state and economy against the longer-term developments in the region. The chapter begins with a brief discussion of precolonial Bengal, a period with important implications for the shaping of the natural environment and of social and religious identities.

Abstract:The Partition of India in 1947 that resulted in the death and displacement of millions of people continues to inhabit the cognizance of the people of South Asia as a historical phenomenon laden with violence. Although the bequest of the Partition is palpable in episodes of religious tension, discourses on minority belonging, secularism, nation and nationalism in India, critical exploration of the phenomenon as a tension-ridden historical episode has largely been restricted.

Abstract: Since the early 1980s, novels by Indians in English have become the site of a transnational publishing ‘boom’ made possible by the opening of Anglo-American literary markets to non-white writing. This essay begins by illuminating the disconnect between the postcolonial versus transnational framings of Indian English fiction. It shows how this literature has gone from being grounded in the politics of particular places to being framed as a de-territorialized literary flourishing, thereby denuding it of its political relevance in an era of transnational literary production.

The purpose of this chapter is to examine the atrocities against women during the Bangladesh Liberation War using memory narratives, historical accounts, and fiction. Through a particular focus on Sorayya Khan's Noor (2003), the chapter analyzes women's memories of such traumatic experiences to argue that Bengali women were not only subjected to sexual violence by the West Pakistani military but were also ostracised by their nation to create a true Bangladeshi identity.

This paper focuses on the issue of violence against women during the communal riots that followed the Partition of India in 1947. The gender-specific reading of partition genocide facilitates a discussion on various forms of violence that targeted women and the symbolic meanings behind these acts. In addition, the paper explores the notion of nation as “mother” and its ideological implications for female citizens.

Refugee history at present lacks a conceptual framework, notwithstanding the proliferation of recent contributions that contribute to enlarging the field. Our article seeks to advance refugee history by drawing upon extensive research into historical case studies and proposing the framework of refugeedom.

Abstract from author: Scholarly inquiries into communalism in South Asia have often exclusively focused on politically constructed religious and ethnic identity categories. This article challenges these assumptions by arguing that territoriality and the designation of homelands played an important, but largely unrecognized, role in developing social and political boundaries in the region.

A standard narrative exists about the role of Muslims during the Partition in India, which talks about how the Muslim community, led by Muhammad Ali Jinnah and his Muslim League, stood for the two-nation theory and demanded the Partition of India. Historical documents, however, suggest that a majority of the Muslims opposed the Partition and stayed in India.

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.

This article will take as its case study the 1947 India/Pakistan partition, and is based on a large oral history project, which took place over the last five years. In this article, I focus on selected excerpts from some of my interviews, examining the ways in which people describe religious belief, practice, prejudice and violence as corporeal experiences, with markers of religiosity often inscribed on the body. I examine how the corporeality of religious violence was not an aberration from everyday religious practices, but in effect an extension of religion as an embodied entity.

How are migrant communities policed in cities of the Global South where racially securitized discourses and colonial institutional legacies shape contemporary police practice? Critical criminologists advise that postcolonial perspectives offer valuable insights on imperial legacies, while allowing us to expand conceptual and empirical analyses of crime, policing, justice, and social order.

Abstract: The focus of this essay is gendered collective memory of the partition of the Indian sub-continent in 1947, at the time of Independence from British rule. The essay addresses the question of whether there are similarities between trauma studies that developed within a Western Freudian psychoanalytic framework and the anti-colonial theory practiced by decolonizing nations. Taking two women's texts, the essay examines how gender manifests itself within the framework of trauma and how it is played out in collective memory of partition.