The objective of this study were to determine the existing conditions of the refugees in the West Dinajpur district in West Bengal, India, and their grievances towards the central and state government of India and the demographic change which had a severe impact on the society and economy of West Dinajpur District from 1947-2011. The other objectives of this study are as follows. To study the history of refugee resettlement programme in West Dinajpur. To asses the origin of the Refugee problem, it’s nature, characteristics and development.

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 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.

Maps of India offers a summary of events that describe the 1947 Partition of India and Pakistan.

The partition of Bengal in 1905 was a good example. East Bengalis were mostly peasants, mostly Muslims, mostly resentful of Kolkata and popular with the newly arriving Muslim middle class. In 1906 the Muslim League was formed in Dhaka which gave Indian Muslims a political voice.

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.

The Sylhet Referendum of 1947 led to the Partition of the state of Assam, but it left Sylheti Hindus in strife for decades.

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.

The state of Punjab also labeled as the Gateway of India has been acknowledged by different names since ancient times. The term Punjab consists of two Persian words i.e. PANJ (five) and AAB (water). It means that the five rivers-the Sutlej, the Beas, the Ravi, the Chenab and the Jhelum- originating from the Himalayas which flow through the fertile land of Punjab. In Rigveda it has been described as Sapt-Sindhu i.e. the land of seven rivers, the Sutlej, the Beas, the Ravi, the Chenab, the Jhelum, the Sindhu and the Saraswati.

A New Life in Huddersfield – Memories of Partition and Migration documents Huddersfield’s survivors of the Partition of India in 1947, a significant event in history, and their subsequent migration to the UK to Huddersfield, an industrial town nestled within the Pennine Hills of West Yorkshire. The documentary has been developed by Let’s Go Yorkshire as part of The White Line heritage project.

Abstract: This essay draws upon the anthropological conceptualization of ‘rites of passage’ to consider the 1947 Partition of the Indian sub-continent as such a rite, into what Liisa Malkki has called the national order of things. As a rite of passage, analytically distinguished into three phases of separation, transition or limen and incorporation, Partition stories can be seen as potentially about the phase of liminality — Pakistani-Indian and not-Pakistaninot-Indian — a liminality which is both ‘structurally invisible’ and deeply threatening to the ‘stable state’ or national order.

The issue of the Partition of the Indian subcontinent which was selected for study was, is and will always be an issue of national importance. The Indian Partition is not to be seen only as an important and crucial moment in history. It is coupled with the birth of a nation and is also a permanent marker of ‘self’ and ‘other’ on a gigantic material and national scale The Indian Partition has raised many issues and questions about citizenship, national identity and the making of national and sub national mentalities.

The state of Goa is certainly blessed with amazing geographic location along with variety in culture and architecture. The state was once a Portuguese colony and still has many beautiful reminiscent of the Portuguese era. One of such places is located in the capital city of Panjim. Fontainhas area, near Ourem Creek in Panjim, has the Latin quarters of the Portuguese colonists. Portuguese Architecture can thus, best be relished in Fontainhas Goa, a Portuguese Colony in Goa.

Long before war propelled Afghanistan into the headlines of the 21st century, this rugged, mountainous Central Asian nation captured the imagination of the West as a key thoroughfare to the Far East – the latter helping to explain why this landlocked nation’s cuisine is so focused on hospitality.

"This resource is a guide for dietitian/nutritionists to provide culturally appropriate and effective services to Afghan community members. It follows the ADIME format and provides information about the food and food practices of people from Afghanistan who have settled in Brisbane (Australia). "

Informed by Afghan and Pakistani expert interviews, this report explores the historical dynamics and future trajectory of the Afghanistan-Pakistan relationship and its impact on Afghan stability.

From BBC: A special report on how India, Pakistan, and since 1971 Bangladesh, have developed since partition.

This article explores the conditions and treatment of the ordinary refugees—survivors of the 1947 partition violence—in the Pakistan Punjab relief camps, in particular the circumstances of women, children and those who arrived with terrible wounds, yet received at best rudimentary medical assistance when the emergent Pakistan state was still working out its responsibilities in the process of transition. A large number of them succumbed to the epidemics which swept refugee camps.

The Bengali director’s films are one of the most powerful artistic articulations of the trauma of displacement after the Partition.

"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 physical violence also highlights the dimension of fear. Victims are always under the siege of psychological trauma that devastates their human existence.

Ashoka Gupta was a renowned social worker who dedicated her life to social service. In 1946 a violent communal riot erupted in Noakhali in erstwhile East Bengal when Hindu life and property were targeted and conversion was undertaken under the threat of death. Assaults and molestation of women formed a significant feature of the riots. As soon as the news of the riots reached outside world, the members of the All India Women’s Conference formed a Relief Committee with Ashoka as its convenor. Initially they distributed relief materials to the fleeing villagers.

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.

Not many have heard about the collection of narrative experiences in Barbed Wire Fence: Stories Of Displacement From The Barak Valley Of Assam. In Partition studies, there is an imbalance in the study of the experiences of women from the northeast, who experienced Partition very differently from those of Punjab and the West of the country. For them, the process of Partition was not a one-time incident that took place, but an ongoing process with a long history, that started with the seeds of hatred sown during the first partition of the province of Bengal in 1905.

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 Partition, which led to the creation of India and Pakistan as two independent countries, was only one among many partitions linked with the decolonization of the British Empire after World War II. The first major partition of British India took place in 1937 when Burma was constitutionally separated, with native voices calling for political representation and restrictions on the flow of Indian migrants

Studies on militarisation and borders in South Asia have often remained focused on zones of spectacular conflict such as Kashmir, or Punjab during the partition. This article tracks the production of a discourse on borders by those charged with border security such as the police and other senior bureaucracy in the decades following the partition.

Before the Partition of British India (1947), Calcutta (Kolkata) was as much of a Muslim city as it was a Hindu one. Muslims who came to this city belonged to diverse classes, various sects and spoke in different tongues. Bengali-speaking Muslims came to Calcutta from neighbouring rural districts and they found work in the service sector. Being the prime centre of education, Calcutta also attracted young men from elite Bengali Muslim families.

Chandannagar was established as a French colony in 1673, when the French obtained permission from Ibrahim Khan, the Nawab of Bengal, to establish a trading post on the right bank of the Hughli River. In that year (1673-74) Duplessis, the French Commander,built a house after gathering a plot at Taldanga on the northern part of the present Chandannagar with the permission of Ibrahim Khan, the then Nawab of Bengal.Bengal was then a province of the Mughal Empire.

"China and India are burying the hatchet after four-plus decades of hostility. A few companies from both nations have been quick to gain competitive advantages by viewing the two as symbiotic. If Western corporations fail to do the same, they will lose their competitive edge—and not just in China and India but globally.

"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.

Commercialization of Textile industry under British Rule: Assessing the plight of artisans in western and Eastern India.

"In recent years the theme of the long afterlife of the Partition of India has emerged as a major preoccupation in Partition Studies in South Asia. Drawing upon this burgeoning field of scholarship, the present thesis is an attempt to study this long afterlife in a specific geographical context and its specifics. But, more significantly, the thesis is an attempt to suggest that it is the very dynamic of post-Partition displacement and relocation that determines why the afterlife cannot but be long.

In the aftermath of conflicts, refugees are often treated as helpless victims of trauma in need of international aid and intervention. Refugees can and do however move beyond the culture of dependency to create sustainable existences within their new environments. While much attention is given to the politics of displacement, humanitarian intervention and human rights of refugees, little is written about the ways in which refugees actually live, particularly those who have chosen to settle themselves rather than allow outside powers to intervene in their settlement choices.

"The present paper deals with the study of Cultural Migration and its impact on Northern Haryana after Partition. This paper describes the migration of Sindhi, Multani and Sikh cultures during the Partition of India in 1947. Culture also travels with people’s migration.Migration has contributed to the richness of diversity of cultures, ethnicities, and races in developed countries. When the Sindhi, Multani and Sikh people reached in this region and put down their impact on native culture, these impactsare discussed in this paper"

The article analyses recent public initiatives to memorialise the establishment of India and Pakistan as postcolonial states in terms of violent partitioning rather than as a successful act of independence from British imperialism. The twin focal points of the article are the Partition Museum in Amritsar and the online 1947 Partition Archive.

It happened a long time ago but the wounds inflicted on the Hindu psyche are too deep to be forgotten. The great massacre of Calcutta in 1946 is a story of collusion between the mullah, neta, government & british. Everyone was guilty of the murder of Hindus - whose only fault was that they belonged to the Sanatan Dharma.

"This paper attempts to delineate and focus on the common narrative thread running through subsequent cinematic treatises on the situation of women during the Partition, particularly those kidnapped and sexually violated during the vivisection. It proposes to construct a cultural and memorialized history of the Partition through a reading of mediated representations of literary engagements with the event, particularly the narrativization of the cinematic trope of the ‘radicalized’ Muslim and his involvement in the abduction of “chaste” Hindu women during the cataclysmic event.

The spectre of partition narratives of 1947 and its legacy continues to haunt diverse groups of people across the nation-state including the mindset of North East Indians. North East India, also known as the ‘Land of Seven Sisters’ is home to numerous ethnolinguistic groups, consisting of 357 constitutional communities embracing 32 scheduled castes and 182 scheduled tribes communities. Despite being a melting pot of diverse ethnic groups and a hub of untapped resources, the region continues to be one of the most economically laggard regions within the country.

Abstract: This essay examines the representation of Dalit refugees’ experiences in post-Partition West Bengal through Adhir Biswas’ memoirs Deshbhager smriti ([Biswas, Adhir. 2010. Deshbhager Smriti. 4 vols. Kolkata: Gangchil], Bengali) and Allar jomite paa ([Biswas, Adhir. 2012. Allar jomite paa. Kolkata: Gangchil], Bengali) and Manoranjan Byapari’s autobiographical work Itibritte chandal jibon ([Byapari, Manoranjan. 2012. Itibritte Chandal Jibon. 1 vol. Kolkata: Kolkata Prakashan], Bengali).

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

In this article Meenakshi Mukherjee traces the impact of the Indian partition of 1947 on the creative writing, films and intellectual life of India and Pakistan.

India and Pakistan will celebrate their 74th Independence Day this year. Both the countries have come far from their situation on the eve of independence, in terms of infrastructure, economy, globalization and overall development. Yet, the ghost of horrendous partition continues to haunt both nations, with the relationship between India and Pakistan still strained after more than half a century. It is finally time to understand the totality of partition to overcome these differences and come to terms with the past.

The motion: This house believes Britain owes reparations to her former colonies.

ABOUT THE OXFORD UNION SOCIETY: The Union is the world's most prestigious debating society, with an unparalleled reputation for bringing international guests and speakers to Oxford. It has been established for 189 years, aiming to promote debate and discussion not just in Oxford University, but across the globe.

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.

During core this quarter, the topic of the India Partition has brought up many influential figures, ideas about the standing of a nation, and the complex division between culture, which in this case can be directly associated with religion. The entire topic of it itself intrigued me; the historical occurrence of a divide between what once was a whole country, and even more bizarre, what has culminated into two very distinct nations today.

"Political history of Partition of India in 1947 is well-documented by historians. However, the grass root politics and and the ‘victimhood’ of a number of communities affected by the Partition are still not fully explored. The scholarly moves to write alternative History based on individual memory and family experience, aided by the technological revolution have opened up multiple narratives of the partition of Assam and its aftermath.

The partition of India in 1947 was, and undoubtedly remains, the most turbulent episode in the recent history of the subcontinent. Of course, the reading of Partition history, be it through its humanitarian or political dimension, is anything but uniform. It is observable that a group narrative of Partition exists for each community directly affected by the event – that is to say, Hindu, Muslim and Sikh respectively.

Sonam Kalra & Group’s Partition: Stories of Separation uses different mediums and voices to retell the tragedy

"With the 60th anniversary of the establishment of formal diplomatic ties between the People’s Republic of China and the Republic of India taking place in the spring of 2010, the time was right to further explore the China-India relationship. On July 29, 2010, CNA China Studies hosted a half-day roundtable to discuss this important topic.

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.

Abstract: Using a feminist episteme I examine the exclusion of the East Bengal/East Pakistan experience in constructions of contemporary narratives of Partition. Including the double colonialism of East Bengal, its particular location in the ethnic and religious hierarchies of the region, and the simultaneity of separation and violence as well as freedom and social mobility challenges the emergent meta-narrative of violence by contributing a contradictory interpretation of the Partition experience.

Food is not just to satiate your palate, it can also play a part in improving strained ties between India and Pakistan, says Pakistani celebrity chef Mohammed Gyazzuddin.

The community however turned hardship into success and thrived by assimilating into the host society.

Independence for India and Pakistan in 1947 marked a decisive turning point in modem history, the first stage in the decolonisation of Asia and Africa over the next decades. Today, 38 years on, historians, ex-civil servants and politicians of the period are still vigorously debating how and why partition of British India came about. Independence is a highly sensitive topic, rousing emotions of anger, sorrow, patriotism, pride, guilt.

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.

Gandhi’s famous sojourn in Noakhali was the ultimate test for the idea and practice of non-violence. It failed.

Demonstrators observe silence together, they sing in tandem, give and listen to speeches and clarify what impelled them to come out of their homes and occupy public land. In the process, they tell us what they stand for and from where they speak.

"Partition history and the fiction related to it have been the focus of many studies in the past two decades. The reasons are manifold: the need to go back to one's roots, the growing interest of India and Pakistan in each other's cultures, finding parallels, drawing upon common issues and a constant endeavor to reconcile with the past which includes understanding 'history' and its relation with Nation.

A collection of photographic images relating to the 1947 Partition of India. Some notable photographers included in this collection are Margaret Bourke-White, Bert Hardy, and Robert Nickelsberg.

This article explores the relationship between refugees and urban segregation, using Calcutta as a site of analysis. Using interviews and other sources, it shows how refugees displaced Muslims in the process of squatting in the post-partition period. The aims of the article are two-fold. First, it aims to investigate the ways in which refugees, often considered ‘victims’ of persecution, can in fact become hegemonic forces within the urban environments to which they are displaced. This complicates their subject positions within larger geopolitical and urban discourses.

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 most contentious historical issue between Bengali Hindus and Bengali Muslims is the migration of a very large number of Hindus from East Bengal (East Pakistan) around partition and in the following decades, and even from Bangladesh later. The process appears to still be ongoing, although at a hugely reduced rate. This change was not entirely a smooth and spontaneous one. It involved the uprooting of a large settled population from their ancestral land, where the elite of the same had been in a very dominant position hitherto.

If the government provides necessary support, we can again create a billion dollar opportunity without huge investments. But if we continue to teach everyone English and computers in the name of skill development, then we will only produce more salesmen and gatekeepers of shopping malls.

After the fall of British Empire in India during the year 1947, most of the Jute Barons had begun to evacuate India, leaving behind the industrial setup of the Jute Industry. Most of the jute mills that were present in India had been taken over by the Marwaris businessmen. In East Pakistan after the partition that took place in 1947 lacked a Jute Industry but still had the finest stock of Jute fibre.

Partition certainly caused a great division among the music fraternity of the Indian sub-continent

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

On 16 October 1905 Bengal was formally partitioned by Lord Curzon creating ‘East Bengal and Assam’. It followed by the Anti-Partition agitation and the Swadeshi movement (1905-1911). The Swadeshi movement emphasized on indigenous production and boycott of foreign goods. Bhadralok consisting primarily of educated and elite persons of Bengal started the movement. Rabindranath’s Swadeshi and Atmasakti (Self-reliance) became the new gospel and Bande Mataram the mantra of the age.

The birth of India and Pakistan as independent states in 1947 was a key moment in the history of Britain’s Empire and its army. But the process of partition was attended by mass migration and ethnic violence that has left a bitter legacy to this day. This is a collection of momentous ols photos and bits of information about the same.

Abstract:This paper seeks to analyse the causes of sectarian violence against women which are rooted in the history of the partition of the country during independence and patriarchal attitudes which continue to dominate society. That this violence was gendered is a fact largely ignored by recorded historyal though it appears as a recurrent theme in the fictional narratives of 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 violence that accompanied partition, which led to the death of up to a million people and the displacement of millions more, ranks among the worst human tragedies of the twentieth century. Seventy years on, the world is still grappling with the consequences of these seismic events in 1947. From ongoing conflicts at the Indo-Pakistan border, to unresolved questions about the place of religious minorities within both countries, to the traumatic memories of violence that shaped the origins of both nations, the South Asian subcontinent remains marked by that fateful time.

The push for Indian independence quickly gained momentum following World War II; alongside demands for independence from Great Britain was a second movement to create a separate state for Muslims. The All India Muslim League felt that as minorities in a Hindu majority India, Muslim interests would not be represented in independent India. Leaders in Hindu and Muslim political organizations, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar and Muhammad Ali Jinnah (both staunch secularists) advocated the idea that Hindu and Muslims formed two separate nations.

From website: "Indian Memory Project is an online, curated, visual and narrative based archive that traces a history of the Indian Subcontinent, via photographs and letters found in personal archives. Contextualised with narratives, the photographs & letters (contributed by people all over the world) reveal a powerful and historical palimpsest of a largely undocumented society and sub-continent.

The Indian textile industry has a significant presence in the economy as well as in the international textile economy. Its contribution to the Indian economy is manifested in terms of its contribution to the industrial production, employment generation and foreign exchange earnings. It contributes 20 percent of industrial production, 9 percent of excise collections, 18 percent of employment in the industrial sector, nearly 20 percent to the countrys total export earning and 4 percent to the Gross Domestic Product.

Politeja - No. 40, MODERN SOUTH ASIA: A SPACE OF INTERCULTURAL DIALOGUE (2016), pp. 21-30 (10 pages)

This paper brings out some dimensions of the crucial political relationship between Muhammad Iqbal and Mohammad Ali Jinnah. Though this relationship had far-reaching consequences in shaping the contours of the subcontinent's turbulent history, it has not been adequately studied in partition histories.

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.

The beauty of Khadi is in the irregularities that are always revealed in a length of this ancient cloth - defects derived from human hands. It is this handmade quality, with its inherent story of human energy, that creates a romance the cloth connoisseur craves.

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.

From website: "This site aims at offering a scholarly yet readable narrative of some aspects of Indian history, politics, culture, and religion. It does not in the least aspire to be comprehensive, an objective that at any rate cannot be achieved, and subjects, personalities, and themes have been chosen for exploration and interpretation because they interest the creator of the site, though often they are of intrinsic importance in understanding the history and evolution of Indian civilization."

Memory Practices in History Education about the 1947 British India Partition: Opportunities and Challenges to Breaching Hegemonic Remembering Meenakshi Chhabra This article is an epistemological reflection on memory practices in the construction, deconstruction and reconstruction of collective memories of a historical event involving collective violence and conflict in formal and informal spaces of education. It focuses on the 1947 British India Partition of Punjab.

The 1947 Mirpur Massacre was the worst massacre of Indian history in which 18,000 Hindus and Sikhs out of 25,000 were massacred and about 3,500 were wounded. The massacre took place in Mirpur which is now in Pok Occupied Kashmir (POK). It occurred after India’s Independence on November 25, 1947. At that time, Jawaharlal Nehru was the Prime Minister of India. Sadly, being a Prime Minister of India he did not do anything to save 25,000 Hindus and Sikhs. He did not send the Indian Army for a rescue operation.

On his birth anniversary, ThePrint remembers Mrinal Sen, the pioneer of New Cinema movement, who was often criticised for making movies on human suffering.

Discovering Partition Literature is one of the most significant events of my life. The idea that simple objects carry great human value as a tangible memory, strikes a chord in me while reading about the largest mass migration to date. It’s intriguing to see that an event that almost shaped nations, carries a story of silence.

This article is about the human history of the Partition of India and the phenomenon of forming material memories through Aanchal Malhotra’s “Remnants of a Separation: A History of the Partition through Material Memory”.

In the present work, it is my endeavour to discuss the growth of the Muslim politics in the Punjab from 1919 to 1947. The study of this period forms an important and interesting subject of research for a variety of reasons. The period from 1919 to 1947 marks an important phase in the history of the Punjab. At the close of the World War I in 1919, the Punjab was passing through a very critical period. The passage of the MontaguChelmsford Reforms, the Rowlatt Bills and Jallianwala Bagh tragedy created anarchy in the province.

This article seeks to recover the experience and agency of refugee women during the process
of rehabilitation after Partition, focusing on technical training.2
It explores the ideas that
underpinned the process of rehabilitating refugee women in the immediate years following the
Partition of India in August 1947, within the Bombay state. This article contributes to attempts in
the historiography to challenge conventional histories of Partition that have marginalised

Ever since the Partition, novelists on either side of the India–Pakistan border have used fictional space imaginatively to formulate discourses on a humanistically-centred, multiplistically-defined Other identity, which writes itself into existence through the prism of the novelists’ contextual present. In this article, I will focus on three partition narratives: Salman Rushdie's Midnight's children (1980), Bapsi Sidhwa's Ice candy man (1988) and Amitav Ghosh's The shadow lines (1988).

The Online Encyclopedia of Mass Violence is a database “focusing on massacres and genocides of the 20th century,” including historical descriptions and analyses of well-documented and less well-known massacres. There are three types of documents available on the website: Chronological Indexes, Case Studies, Scholarly Reviews and Theoretical Papers.

Studies glorifying wars and conquests abound. Many of these justify ruthless use of power to achieve the desired goals. While promoting warrior culture and whipping up jingoism, these show little interest in the fate of hundreds of thousands of human beings condemned to suffer the consequences.

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.

This show is an extension of Saffronart’s mission to invite people to engage with art by showcasing one senior artist at a time. Earlier one-man shows in the same vein have featured SH Raza, VS Gaitonde and FN Souza. Step inside and see what you make of this one.

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.

An academic work, (PhD Thesis). Abstract from the author: The partition of India in August 1947 was marked by the greatest migration in the Twentieth Century and the death of an estimated one million persons. Yet until recently (Ansari 2005; Talbot 2006) little was written about the longer term socioeconomic consequences of this massive dislocation, especially for Pakistan. Even when the ‘human dimension’ of refugee experience rather than the ‘high politics’ of partition was addressed, it was not specifically tied to local case studies (Butalia, 1998).

A Thesis Submitted to Gauhati University for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in History in the Faculty of Arts. "The Partition of India in 1947 brought a morbid sense of isolation, leaving people on both sides of the border vulnerable, with a sense of displacement and uprootedness. Large scale migration of people from the minority community, with the intention of having a better and secured life with the people of their religious affiliation, marked the post-partition period.

This dissertation investigates the impact of the partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947 on the development of art, art institutions, and aesthetic discourse in India and Pakistan in the twentieth century. At the core of this study is the history of the Lahore Museum, whose collections of art and archaeology were divided between the emerging nations of India and Pakistan beginning in 1948.

In the wake of the turbulent Partition, it is estimated that about half-a-million refugees arrived in Delhi from what then became Pakistan. This huge influx of people with different socio-economic and cultural backgrounds had the effect of a gradual transformation of Delhi in all fields of activity. Among these, the change in the food culture of Delhi was perhaps the most unique.

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).

An index of selected sources on the Partition of 1947.

An estimated 25 million Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs (1947–present) crossed the newly drawn borders to reach their new homelands. These estimates are based on comparisons of censuses from 1941 and 1951 with adjustments for normal population growth in the areas of migration. In northern India – undivided Punjab and North Western Frontier Province (NWFP) – nearly 12 million were forced to move from as early as March 1947 following the Rawalpindi violence.

While India is known to have taken birth in 1947 as a modern state, the civilisational ethos of India has survived for ages. Mr. Fatah proposes the need to develop a grand narrative of the Indian civilisation that extends beyond the geographical boundaries of the Indian Territory. Narrating the horror of the continuing conflict in Baluchistan, Tarek Fatah supports the cause of Baloch nationalists to be liberated from the control of Pakistan.

Writer, Broadcaster, a Secular and Liberal Activist. Tarek Fatah is a scholar par excellence with command over a range of subjects.

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.

From Website: "Over the past twenty years, I have conducted scores of interviews with people with personal stories to tell of Partition - the botched division of British India in August 1947 to created two independent nations, India and Pakistan. It produced one of the great tragedies of a deeply tragic century - at least half-a-million dead, ten million or more migrants, and the rupture of a symbiotic culture, most notably in Punjab.

"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.

Abstract: The mediation, through representations, which gives rise to cultural trauma, sets off 'a dramatic loss of identity and meaning, a tear in the social fabric, affecting a group of people that has achieved some degree of cohesion’. An application of Bon Eyerman’s theory of cultural trauma as it relates to the formation of the Indian and Pakistani identities depends largely on the experiential mediation of the partition violence of 1947 — a mediation which conjoins collective memory and national identity through cultural templates.

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.

Partition of India was one of the most traumatic events of History. Millions were uprooted from their roots and migrated as a consequence. This partition was as a result of the ‘Divide and Rule’ policy followed by the British and taken up' by the Muslims fundamentalists. The division was not based on a clear-cut acceptance of geographical boundaries by India and Pakistan. When the final Radcliffe Award was announced, it failed to satisfy the aspirations of the people.

“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.

Abstract: The 'discovery' of torture and its prevalence in the extraction of confessions produced a dilemma for the colonial state in India. Especially with the publication of the two-volume Report of the Commissioners for the Investigation of Alleged Cases of Torture in the Madras Presidency in 1855, colonial administrators became uncomfortably aware of the contrived nature of the 'truth' produced before magistrates and the police.

Punjabi people are robust people with robust appetites and their food is like the Punjabis themselves, simple, sizeable and hearty with no unnecessary frills or exotic accompaniments. The Punjabi tandoori cooking is celebrated as one of the most popular cuisines throughout the world. Huge earthen ovens are half buried in the ground and heated with a coal fire lit below it. Marinated meat, chicken, fish, paneer, rotis and naans of many types are cooked in this novel oven and the results are absolutely scrumptious!Punjab has imbibed some aspects of its cuisine from external influences.

Studies of Punjabi partition-related refugee resettlement have revealed a gap between official accounts and those provided by migrants. The former seek to legitimize the state by narrating its role in the transformation of helpless refugees into productive citizens. First hand accounts on the other hand frequently write the state out of the rehabilitation process.

This article will address the themes of partition, gender and trauma within two independent films from Pakistan, Sabiha Sumar's Khamosh Pani (2003) and Mehreen Jabbar's Ramchand Pakistani (2008). The article will consider how the events of 1947 – partition of India and creation of Pakistan – recur within the films as disruptive trauma. The article will consider what an engagement with the characteristics of trauma such as involuntary recall and disruption can bring to my readings of the films.

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.

The city’s southern limit extended beyond Lodhi Road, which was a forest land then. Colonies like Malviya Nagar, Lajpat Nagar, Nizamuddin, Kalkaji and Jangpura were created to accommodate refugees. “Lodhi Road was the southern boundary of the imperial suburban do pen fields and scrub lay beyond, where jackals howled and black bucks roamed,” wrote Ranjana Sengupta, in an anthology, City Improbable: An Anthology of Writings on Delhi, edited by Khushwant Singh.

The project studies the role of education and school in the lives of the refugees who settled in West Bengal after the partition of British India in 1947. Most of the early refugees from East Bengal belonged to the upper or middle caste groups–the bhadraloks. They tended to gravitate towards the urban centres, more specifically to Calcutta. An acute housing crisis forced a majority of them to forcibly occupy barracks and empty tracts of lands and to build up squatter colonies there.

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.

This paper interrogates the reparative possibilities of representing subjugated voices in historical narratives. It examines, first, the onto-epistemic conditions under which this representation becomes possible. Further, it demonstrates that the possibility of representation is contingent upon the reproduction of the subjugated subject as a signifier of onto-epistemic difference. This form of representation fails to repair the harm underlying subjugation.

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.

Gandhi’s role in the leadership he gave to Assam Congress to help geographically integrate the northeast to independent India is not well documented.

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.

Abstract: While communal violence has been an ongoing and unfortunate reality for post-colonial and post-partition India, there’s no sidestepping the fact that attacks and hate crime incidences against the country’s Muslim minority by members of the Hindu majority have occurred in greater frequency and ferocity in the years since Prime Minister Narendra Modi, leader of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), came to power in 2014 –on the back of a Hindu nationalist agenda, one in which anti-Muslim animus and discrimination features in mainstream political discourse and government policy.

Revolutionary filmmaker Ritwik Ghatak mirrored the pain of Bengal’s partition and refugee crisis through his famed trilogy, which began with Megha Dhaka Tara.

The 1947 partition of India is inadequately understood within the context of earlier partitions in the British Indian empire. Sindh, an understudied province in the historiography on partition, provides a particularly important angle of vision through which to view the history of partitioning. The key committees that recommended the shape of constitutional reform in the lead up to the Government of India Act 1935 justified the creation of the new province of Sindh (separated from Bombay) on the basis of religious majority as well as ‘racial’ difference.

Of course nationalism is a good – yet it has also created zones of dangers for ethnic minorities, for people who it is held do not belong, and for the vulnerable.

Ms Marvel is one example of how South Asian creatives are bringing the partition of Indian subcontinent to popular culture. Here are some others.

This introduction frames a selection of papers that encourage a richer spatial understanding of the years before the Partition of India. The papers respond to two types of questions. One type is spatial (at what scale do we approach Partition? Through which spaces should we attempt to understand both micro and macro processes? Movements across what distances constituted Partition?). The second type is temporal (what timescales do we invoke when approaching Partition? Of what was it the endpoint? What sort of memories were invoked and made during India’s multiple partitions?).

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.