In the summer of 1947, seven-year-old Vijay Kumar Kakkar from Lahore was visiting his grandparents’ home in Srinagar when India’s last viceroy, Louis Mountbatten, announced the end of British rule and the partition of the country. : a Hindu majority and a Muslim majority Pakistan. The new line drawn on the map was at Lahore in the newly formed Pakistan. Srinagar was in India. Mr. Kakkar and his family – who were practicing Hindus – never returned home, fearing for their safety in the chaos that followed. Implemented on August 14–15, 1947, the hastily planned partition resulted in one of the largest and fastest migrations in history, leaving more than 15 million people displaced and more than a million people dead in violence on both sides of the border. This year, India celebrates 75 years of independence from the British Empire. But the legacy of partition, long relegated to a minor event in history textbooks, is only now beginning to be seriously examined. A growing movement of community-led organizations here has brought forgotten stories to the fore through the lived stories of those who witnessed it. Their aim is to record the stories of survivors and understand the impact it had on generations of Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis and their diaspora. “We lost everything because of Partition,” said Mr Kakkar, who is now 82 and lives in New Delhi. “But we had to survive, so we set up base in Delhi and started life anew.” He recalled the mob violence that spread across the states as enmity between Sikhs, Hindus and Muslims boiled over into full-blown violence. Radicalized groups have driven families of the minority religion from their homes on both sides of the border. Millions businesses and homes were looted, families massacred and thousands of women kidnapped and raped. Mr. Kakkar’s family would be a minority in Lahore, so they could never return home. With violence also breaking out in Srinagar, they soon had to flee to a refugee camp in Delhi. Struggling to resettle, his parents didn’t have time to dwell on their misfortune. when they looked around the camp, everyone was going through a similar loss. Mr. Kakkar’s story, like millions of other witnesses to segregation, remained virtually buried for decades. Is reconciliation still possible for India and Pakistan, 75 years after partition? “Partition’s legacy has been kept very private,” said Guneeta Singh Bhalla, its founder 1947 Partition Archive, a grassroots project to preserve the oral history of survivors. “There was a silence around what the generation that lived through it had experienced as refugees were heavily stigmatized, made to feel like they were doing something wrong. In fact, it had happened to them through no fault of their own. Only now have we begun to give them the respect they deserve.” So far the archive has documented 10,500 stories from 14 countries, including Mr Kakkar’s. “Through the 1947 Apartment Archive, I was able to share my story with the world, especially for the younger generation to learn from it. When I look back, I think that all the hardships we went through became a driving force to push ourselves towards success,” he said. For Dr Bhalla, who splits her time between Delhi and Berkeley, California, creating the archive was an attempt to bridge what she believes is a glaring gap between popular history and the official record. The Punjabi family was also uprooted in 1947. But Partition is not an event that happened to a particular community or was limited to South Asia, he says. “It’s a global story. It is a story of World War II that led to violence against segregation. What happened at Pearl Harbor influenced how the Americans pushed the British to give independence to India for global strategic reasons. We need mass public education and rewriting of history books around the world to connect world history and colonization. It will come from people’s individual stories,” said Dr. Bhalla, who was inspired by the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum and the powerful oral history of survivors who have documented there. “What Partition can teach the world is what can happen when citizens become hyper-polarized and there is communal violence.” It is becoming clear that the partition was not a static event of the past, but one whose lasting impact manifests itself over many generations, researchers and historians say. “It has become a new subject of research and events that connects the older generation, the witnesses, with the younger generation, the heirs, who record their stories. … Some of them had not even shared their stories with their grandchildren,” said Anachal Singh, project manager with the 1947 Archive. When he started recording narratives from across India in 2018, people were hesitant to speak up. “But then things started to change. What has helped make it popular is new dissemination channels opened up through social media.” Beyond preserving the stories of surviving witnesses, the new Partition projects serve a broader, more universal purpose at a time when, globally, issues of decolonization, forced migration, and refugee crises are being critically examined. “We do not seem to have learned lessons from the past, with similar crises occurring in Afghanistan, Ukraine and Syria. Is it because we are not teaching our children proper history? Partition was not taught to me when I moved to the UK as a seven-year-old from India and it was not part of my children’s schooling,” said Raj Unsworth of the Partition Education Group, an organization working for enter his study Partition, South Asian and British colonial history in the UK curriculum, what they call ‘shared history’. “A lot of us felt very ashamed that we didn’t know anything about it, even as South Asians have grown up here. Many of us rejected our own culture as children as a way to fit in, but as you grow up you realize that your sense of identity and belonging is very important, which is what led me to this work,” she said. Facilitating this connection is at the heart of Project Dastaan, an initiative that reconnects Partition refugees with their childhood homes across the border through virtual reality technology. It began as a student project at Oxford University three years ago, and since then he has taken 30 survivors back to the places where they grew up before 1947. “We would watch their homes, mosques, schools, childhood friends – whatever they wanted to see again – that they hadn’t seen in 75 years,” he said. Sam Dalrymple, co-founder and chief operating officer of Project Dastaan, who runs it with founder Sparsh Ahuja and co-founder and Pakistan head Saadia Gardezi. To reach a wider audience, the project has produced a series of films and educational tools for global use, including an interactive map that takes the user to every part of the subcontinent affected by Partition. The idea is to rekindle the forgotten history and inspire more people to interview the generation that witnessed Partition before their stories are lost. “The more I research, I find that the event affects every aspect of everything in the subcontinent, from the Kashmir crisis, to the rise of anti-Muslim rhetoric in India, to the rise of anti-Hindu and anti-Sikh rhetoric in Pakistan. So much of modern politics is rooted in what happened 75 years ago and the unresolved trauma from that time,” Mr Dalrymple said. With a rush of Partition stories now pouring out, including more books and global research projects, Dr. Bhalla believes we are at a turning point: “A lot of cures will happen in the next decade or two.” The Morning Update and Afternoon Update newsletters are written by Globe editors, giving you a concise summary of the day’s most important headlines. Sign up today.
