"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.

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.

Compared to Punjab and Bengal, Gujarat's experiences of the Partition of India in 1947 remain curiously under-researched even though the state has a long border with Pakistan and over a million people migrated to Gujarat, mostly from neighbouring Sindh. This paper seeks to fill this lacuna in Partition scholarship by examining the experiences of two Hindu groups, Sindhis and Gujarati Dalits, who left Sindh to settle in Ahmedabad.

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).

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

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

Last month, 90-year-old Reena Chhibber Varma, undeterred by age and ailments, embarked on a journey that many thought was impossible.

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.