The first time I learned about the Partition, it must have been through school textbooks. But they didn’t delve into the mass displacement, violence and trauma caused by one of the largest forced migrations and tragedies of the 20th century, which occurred when British India was divided into India and Pakistan in 1947 as the countries gained independence from colonial rule. Over 14 million people migrated and over a million were killed in the communal riots that engulfed the region. It was perhaps through the stories of friends’ families — grandparents who migrated to Delhi from what is now Pakistan — that I began to grasp the human cost of it. The slow grief of dislocation, the silence around what was lost and the uneasy pride in having “started from scratch” — for many families in Delhi, a major center for refugees, Partition wasn’t a chapter in a textbook but a lived reality.
Yet I’ve always yearned to know the story of my own family. They have been in Delhi since at least the late 19th century and must have seen — and perhaps even experienced — the violence of Partition. Until four decades ago, they were settled in Old Delhi — the historic part of the city established by the Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan in the 17th century. It was home to a diverse mix of religious communities, whose lives had been woven together for generations through trade, kinship and shared streets. But most of my grandparents died before I was born or when I was very young and I never got the chance to ask about family history from other elders. My mother occasionally mentioned that some of her uncles may have been killed during that time. But whenever I ask more, she shuts down. There is a silence that seems to seal off that part of our past.
I often feel that one inherits the historical trauma of one’s birthplace. In my case, whenever I watch or read something painful about Delhi’s history — be it the 1857 revolt against the British, the 1947 Partition, the 1984 anti-Sikh violence or the 1997 Uphaar Cinema fire — I feel a deep, almost bodily emotion, as if my own blood remembers. But since I could not inherit familial memories, I have turned to oral histories, literature and art to fill in the gaps and understand how the Partition shaped South Asian life, politics and society.
One of the first stories I read was the English translation of the Urdu writer Saadat Hasan Manto’s “Toba Tek Singh” (1955). Set in an asylum in Lahore, it tells the story of the exchange of “lunatics” between India and Pakistan — a darkly satirical mirror of the way the two nations exchanged criminals and citizens. Bishan Singh, a Sikh man, refuses to leave after he learns that his hometown, Toba Tek Singh, now lies in Pakistan. In the end, he dies in no-man’s-land, unable to belong to either country. Manto’s gut-wrenching tales introduced the Partition not only to me but to many in my generation — the third, distant from the event yet deeply affected by it.
Another work that left me in tears was the 2010 Pakistani TV drama “Dastaan” (“Tale”), based on a 1971 novel by the celebrated Urdu writer Razia Butt. Set against the backdrop of Partition, it follows Bano, a young Muslim woman, whose tender love story with Hassan turns into a harrowing tale of communal violence and displacement. After her family is murdered by a mob, Bano has to migrate alone. She is not only gang-raped en route, she is then kidnapped by a Sikh man and spends five years in captivity before reaching Pakistan.
In the decades succeeding Partition, several writers who survived its events captured the trauma and upheaval it caused. Their stories became stand-ins for those of thousands of others that were never written down. They chronicled the carnage caused by the communal riots that preceded and succeeded the act, when mobs descended on neighborhoods; how families fled; the arrival of “ghost trains” bearing dead bodies of refugees killed along the way; raids at the refugee camps where people were killed and looted; honor killings of women by their own families; starvation and the spread of typhoid and cholera leaving more people dead. Many people were also separated from their families. Children were orphaned and adopted by new parents.
Survivors might have shared fragments of their stories with children or grandchildren behind closed doors, but few spoke of their experiences publicly. Most of them wanted to move on and focus on rebuilding their lives. In that silence, it was often artists and writers who imagined what survivors could not yet say aloud.
While academics started writing on the Partition in earnest in the 1990s, which was instrumental in bringing it to the fore in public discourse, it wasn’t until the 2010s that oral history projects began to take shape in South Asia and its diaspora. By then, even the youngest to witness the Partition were in their 60s. The 1947 Partition Archive, a grassroots oral history initiative founded in 2010, which has since collected over 10,000 survivor testimonies all over the world, became one of the most significant projects to date. Several other projects followed, especially around 2017, the 70th anniversary.
Since 2017, a series of books has appeared reexamining the Partition, perhaps spurred by the approaching 80th anniversary. They range from academic to historical works to novels and even children’s books. Yet they share a common thread: the idea that Partition never truly ended. The dispossession of 1947 caused enormous disruptions in the geographies, society and even cuisine of pre-Partition India that endure to the present. These works reframe the Partition not as a singular moment but as an ongoing, multiregional and multigenerational phenomenon, which continues to shape identities and political realities across borders to this day.
One of the significant contributions to Partition literature in the last five years has come from the oral historian Aanchal Malhotra. In 2017, her book “Remnants of a Separation” offered a unique way to revisit history through the objects refugees carried across the border. She returned in 2022 with two remarkable books: “In the Language of Remembering,” a powerful continuation of her oral history project that explores how the Partition is remembered by subsequent generations; and “The Book of Everlasting Things,” a historical fiction set in Lahore.
Malhotra approaches the Partition not as a closed chapter of history but as a legacy that has been inherited and continues to impact the lives and identities of subsequent generations. In the lengthy and comprehensive “In the Language of Remembering,” Malhotra documents stories and conversations with people of South Asian origin from around the world, including communities and regions that have been underrepresented in Partition testimonies and members of subsequent generations who have felt its impact.
For instance, she writes about the Sindhi Sikhs, who she describes as “missing people” in scholarship on Sikhism, Sindh and the Partition. One such account in the book is of my close friend’s family, whom I’ve known since middle school. Her grandparents migrated from Sindh to a small town in Rajasthan. In the book, however, my friend’s aunt — part of the second generation — reflects on how experiencing anti-Sikh violence in Delhi in 1984, when she was a teenager, compelled her to revisit her family’s Partition history. I have also witnessed firsthand how questions of identity and belonging remain fraught for my friend — part of the third generation — who often has to explain that she is Sikh but not Punjabi, a distinction uncommon enough to be confusing to many.
The book features several accounts of Bengali Hindu families, who often remain on the fringes of Partition narratives. These stories underscore the enduring impact of 1947, revealing that the Partition did not end that year, and the movement of people continued for decades. For instance, Malhotra writes about a Bengali Hindu family that remained divided between India and Bangladesh until 1993, when the last members decided to permanently relocate to India following communal riots in Bangladesh sparked by the demolition of the 16th-century Babri Mosque in India by Hindu nationalists.
Another rarely discussed predicament is that of families divided across all three nations of Bangladesh, India and Pakistan. Malhotra writes about a Bangladeshi woman whose family was first split in 1947, when some members moved from India to East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) while others remained in India. The divisions deepened in 1971, when several members migrated from newly formed Bangladesh to Pakistan. Those who stayed behind found themselves marginalized, as Bangladesh’s national identity became closely tied to the Bengali language. Those who spoke in Urdu — Pakistan’s national language — were regarded with suspicion.
These are narratives the complexities of which have not often been fully grasped or articulated, which is what makes Malhotra’s work so remarkable.
The intergenerational impact of the Partition is evident even in the Pakistani-Canadian journalist Sadiya Ansari’s 2024 memoir “In Exile,” in which she traces her grandmother Tahira’s journey from the erstwhile princely state of Hyderabad (in present-day India) to Karachi, where she relocated in 1956 as a widow with seven children. She later moved to rural Punjab after becoming estranged from her family.
“I didn’t think of them [my family] as part of the Partition story. In my head, Partition meant 1947,” Ansari told me over a call from London. “But reading more academic work helped me realize how long that movement actually lasted. Researchers have tracked migrations across the entire decade, and probably even beyond. Some people left much later. So I think it’s important to expand our understanding of what this migration was and how long it unfolded.”
The book demonstrates that longer period of migration, highlighting the story of a Muslim family that relocated from Hyderabad to Karachi. Although it was not intended to be a Partition memoir, it is often included in that category. “What I really wanted was to richly render the environment my grandmother lived in — both before and after the Partition. But as I got deeper into the research, it became a much bigger part of the story than I expected,” she said.
She also noted how the complex history of the erstwhile princely state of Hyderabad often gets erased in mainstream discourses about Indian independence and the Partition. “Once I started digging into the history, I had that moment where I thought: Oh wow, I had no idea it was this complex. And how, for Hyderabad, 1947 wasn’t even the defining year — 1948 was.”
Hyderabad seldom features in the Partition narratives precisely for that reason. When British India was divided in August 1947, most princely states acceded to either India or Pakistan. Hyderabad, one of the largest and wealthiest princely states, chose a different path. Its Muslim ruler of a predominantly Hindu population chose to join neither nation and to remain independent, maintaining security forces that included soldiers of Yemeni origin. This created political and communal tensions, both within the state and with the newly formed Indian government.
In 1947, while Partition violence gripped Punjab and Bengal, Hyderabad too experienced internal unrest fueled by the rise of the Razakars, a paramilitary force loyal to the Nizam, who were accused of suppressing dissent and targeting Hindu communities. Eventually, in September 1948, the Indian government launched “Operation Polo,” a military action to annex Hyderabad, which lasted five days and ended with the state’s formal integration into the Indian Union. However, it was followed by widespread communal violence, which fueled further migration of Muslims to Pakistan.
Ansari’s book is part of a growing body of work by Pakistani-origin writers exploring the Muslim experiences of Partition. These include “The Moon from Dehradun” by Shirin Shamsi, a children’s book which tells the story of a Muslim family fleeing India; “The Partition Project” by Saadia Faruqi, a young adult novel in which a Pakistani-American girl’s passion for journalism sparks a conversation about her grandmother’s experiences during the Partition; and “Broken Threads: My Family from Empire to Independence” by BBC journalist Mishal Husain, in which she traces her maternal and paternal family histories across India, Pakistan and eventually Britain.
In our conversation, Ansari noted that asking questions about her family’s stories became a window into understanding her own history and identity, and other South Asian writers in the diaspora have used the same route to explore Partition’s intergenerational impact.
For instance, the Indian-American writer Anjali Enjeti’s “The Parted Earth” follows the story of a woman in the United States uncovering family secrets tied to the violence of 1947 and moves between Partition-era Delhi and modern-day Atlanta, examining how the trauma of displacement continues to reverberate across generations and geographies.
The story is unlike any other written on the Partition and is unique in centering the story of a Hindu family grappling with the threat of violence despite being in Delhi, a city that was relatively safe for Hindus. The parents of the teen protagonist, Deepa, are doctors who run a clinic that treats Muslim patients. However, as communal tensions rise, the family faces threats from Hindu nationalists who view their compassion for Muslims as a betrayal.
The most infamous Hindu nationalist from that era remains Nathuram Godse, who assassinated Mahatma Gandhi in 1948 for what he perceived as Gandhi’s appeasement of Muslims, particularly his insistence on the Indian government transferring funds to Pakistan and his calls for communal harmony.
This year, Sam Dalrymple’s debut work, “Shattered Lands,” builds on the idea that runs through the other books, namely that the Partition was not confined to 1947. It has reignited interest in these broader, more inclusive understandings of the phenomenon. In this book, Dalrymple has woven a compelling narrative drawing from archival research, previously untranslated private memoirs and interviews in diverse languages to challenge the idea that Partition was a singular event. He argues that the British Indian Empire experienced not one but five distinct partitions, each with its own set of displacements and disruptions.
He begins the book with the separation of Burma (present-day Myanmar) from British India in 1937, when more than a million Indians lived there. This separation, along with the subsequent Japanese invasion during World War II, led to the mass migration of Indians fleeing Burma in what became known as the Long March, accompanied by episodes of ethnic violence.
The Burma separation was closely followed by the separation of Aden and the Gulf Protectorates from the Indian Empire. With Indian independence imminent, full separation was formalized and these territories came under direct British colonial administration.
Dalrymple writes, of course, about the communal tensions before and after the Partition of 1947, which triggered the largest mass migration in human history. He counts the accession crises of the princely states like Junagadh and Hyderabad as extensions of the Partition. Finally, the 1971 Liberation War, which led to the secession of East Pakistan and the birth of Bangladesh, became the fifth and final separation, serving as a powerful reminder that the process of “partition” extended decades beyond the initial event.
Dalrymple mentions the Nobel laureate Amartya Sen, whose ancestral home was in Dhaka (now the capital of Bangladesh) but whose earliest childhood memories were of Burma, where his father was a professor until the family fled in the aftermath of the separation. A few years later, the family moved to Calcutta (now Kolkata in present-day India) as communal violence engulfed the province of Bengal. Their story showed how families had to deal with multiple ruptures throughout the region’s turbulent history.
In recent years, as new research and creative works have revisited the Partition, scholars and historians have increasingly recognized that dominant narratives have long been shaped by elite, upper-caste Punjabi perspectives that have overshadowed the experiences of other communities who were also deeply impacted but historically underrepresented in the mainstream Partition discourse. But a growing body of work now seeks to recover the stories of those who remained on the margins.
In 2018, American writer Veera Hiranandani published “The Night Diary,” drawing from her father’s family history: Her grandfather, a doctor in Mirpur Khas (in Pakistan’s Sindh province), had fled to India during the Partition. The book was rare not only for being among the first written for young adults on the subject, but for telling the story of a Sindhi Hindu family, who were displaced after Sindh became part of Pakistan.
Unlike Punjab and Bengal, Sindh was not divided and went entirely to Pakistan. In the months after the Partition, communal violence and targeted attacks drove out its Hindu population, along with its small Sikh community, who fled to India, leaving behind centuries-old ties to the region. Since then, Sindhi Hindus have been scattered across several western and central states of India and in communities around the world. Predominantly a mercantile community, they have kept a low profile and remained on the fringes of mainstream discussions around religion, ethnicity and territory.
Writers of a new generation, however, are now beginning to recover their pre- and post-Partition history, highlighting not only their distinct experiences but also how their identity differs from other Hindu communities. For instance, their syncretic faith blends elements of Sufi, Sikh and Hindu traditions. There is also now a growing focus on the rich culinary heritage of the Sindhis — tangy vegetable curries, spiced flatbreads and festive sweets — which remains one of the strongest ties to a homeland they can no longer visit. Indian designers of Sindhi heritage have also put their culture on the country’s fashion scene, while musicians like the Delhi-based Tarun Balani are weaving it into sound; his recent album blends Sindhi folk with jazz.
Hiranandani, who grew up in Connecticut, was curious why she did not learn more about this “significant event in our global history” at her school. So, as a writer, she decided to shape a story around it. “I didn’t want the history to be lost, perhaps families could read it together and have an opening for discussion,” she told me in 2018, when I interviewed her for The Indian Express.
Inspired by Anne Frank’s diary, “The Night Diary” follows Nisha and her family from Mirpur Khas as they journey across the border — first by train and then on foot — while facing violent attacks, dehydration and starvation. Nisha writes letters to her mother, who died during childbirth, recounting the harrowing experiences of their migration, shedding light on the brutal violence and threats endured by the Sindhi Hindus.
In 2024, when Hiranandani followed up on “The Night Diary” with the sequel, “Amil and the After,” it was among the few books that explored the aftermath of the Partition. Much of the existing literature focuses on the events leading up to and during the division, leaving the long-term consequences of displacement and rebuilding largely underexamined.
Told from the point of view of Nisha’s twin brother, it follows the family to Bombay (present-day Mumbai), where several displaced Sindhi Hindu families resettled after Partition. It includes the twins, their father and grandmother, and a Muslim cook, Kazi, who chose to migrate with them. However, in a newly independent India still reeling from the aftermath of the Partition riots, where communal suspicion remains high, Kazi introduces himself as “Kavi” in public. Within the family, there is a constant undercurrent of fear about his Muslim identity being discovered.
Grief and depression hang heavy in the narrative. Their father, responsible for supporting the family, is a shadow of his former self. Meanwhile, Amil and Nisha struggle with the trauma of displacement and the grief of losing their home and old way of living. They must adapt to life with limited resources while also confronting survivor’s guilt.
In the novel, Amil often reflects on how they are the “lucky ones” to have a roof over their head and food to eat as they pass by refugee camps scattered throughout the city. This sense of being fortunate resonates with my own family experience. When I attempted to discuss that period with my aunts and uncles, they would not engage with it. Having grown up in the early decades of a newly independent India, they said their focus had been on nation-building and they did not wish to dwell on the past.
And yet what the various explorations of Partition show is that, far from being in the past, it continues to shape the present. It’s everywhere, even if we don’t know it, or try to forget. The stories and legacies of those who migrated remain as reminders that our identities cannot be confined to neat binaries, nor cleansed of their fractures. Yet in an era of deepening borders, they also push back against a kind of historical amnesia — one that forgets the shared homeland and syncretic culture that once thrived.
In two years, the Partition of 1947 will mark its 80th anniversary, and the generation that lived in pre-Partition times will have all but disappeared. Preserving personal histories not only helps reckon with the Partition as a collective trauma, it also records a culture that transcended the lines later drawn on the map.
Become a member today to receive access to all our paywalled essays and the best of New Lines delivered to your inbox through our newsletters.