:The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia: Refugees, Boundaries, Histories.(Cultures of History.)

Abstract

Over the last two decades, several commentators on independent Pakistan and India have paid systematic attention to the formative role played in the making of these nations by the violent displacement of populations that Partition precipitated. As we know, political demand conceived of Pakistan as the home of the subcontinent's Muslims, and its territories were derived from Muslim-majority provinces in the northwest and east of British India. The British administrator charged with the demarcation of these territories, Sir Cyril Radcliffe, worked in haste to dismember the provinces of Punjab and Bengal (his decisions were announced on August 17, 1947, days after both Pakistan and India became independent), but the movement of vulnerable populations had already begun. Muslims moved westward from all over north India, and especially east Punjab, and Hindus and Sikhs moved to India from west Punjab, Sind, and other northwestern provinces now in Pakistan. Similar population movements—at different paces and over many years after 1947—took place between East Pakistan and Indian Bengal and Assam. In 1947 and 1948, however, the deaths of almost one million people and the dislocation of perhaps ten million others had inescapable repercussions for state and community-formation.