When a communal riot broke out in 1950, Ghosh, then five years old, fled with his family across the newly carved border with India from East Pakistan. The train journey was so “bad” and “traumatic” as they left their home to start anew in Calcutta. “All the Hindus in the area had to leave to escape. It was a traumatic time in my life,” said Ghosh, now 76. “I don’t think of Britain as my home. I have lived in this country for the last 40 years, but this sense of uprooting is still there.” August 15 marks the 75th anniversary of the end of British colonial rule in India and the ill-conceived carving out of Pakistan from India, known as partition, which sparked spasms of Muslim-Hindu violence. For many, the history of division has a long generational tail. The 1947 partition resulted in one of the largest migrations in modern history and one of the worst disasters of the 20th century. An estimated 1 million people were killed in the ensuing violence, and nearly 15 million people crossed the newly created border into Hindu-majority and Muslim-majority Pakistan, creating lasting political and religious rifts. In 1971, Bangladesh was created from East Pakistan after a bloody war of independence. In efforts to preserve history, initiatives around the world have worked to gather oral testimonies. Others have called for the UK’s education system to teach the legacy of partition, in what critics say must “acknowledge the impact of the British Empire and the effects of colonialism”. Partition map People the Guardian spoke to who identify as Anglo-Indians described privileged lives in India that were lost when they migrated to England after Partition. Others witnessed the violence of the split, resulting in lifelong scars. “What the British did to us, dividing a country into three countries was not good, but you can’t say that only the British did it,” said Ghosh, whose one wish is to return to the village near Dhaka that frequented as a child. Surinder Shani was 12 years old when his family fled because of riots in Rawalpindi, Pakistan to Jalandhar, India. “It was very scary,” Shani said. Now 87, Shani remembers seeing Sikhs and Hindus murdered and houses burned in Rawalpindi. He witnessed further violence in Jalandhar, he said, as Muslims were killed by Sikhs. “I feel like I don’t belong in England,” said Shani, who believes the experience of partition has shaped his children. “It’s something in my genes. I am very, very proud to be a Punjabi.” For Navtej Kaur Purewal, a professor at Soas University of London who is working on a project exploring the legacy of partition, it is a question of what is honored and how. “It’s not like we’ve forgotten it, there’s just not really a place even today to have these critical conversations about the empire,” Purewal said, noting the recent celebration of the queen’s 70 years on the throne. Archie Bland and Nimo Omer take you to the top stories and what they mean, free every weekday morning Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain information about charities, online advertising and content sponsored by external parties. For more information, see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and Google’s Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Banwari Lal was a student in Firozpur, a town in northern India that now borders Pakistan, at the time of partition. Then 21 and an agnostic, he remembers following a friend to his roof and looking down on the bodies of nearly 100 murdered people. “I can never forget this kind of brutality,” said Lal, now 96. “I remember one kid, he tried to lift his head and he fell back down.” It was one of many events that Lal remembers with striking clarity. One morning, while walking along a road leading to Fazilka, another border town, he spotted people who had traveled from Delhi, leaving behind a caravan crossing Pakistan. Recruiting friends, they fit nearly 15 people in the back of a carriage to catch up with the caravan. “We were really very sad in every way,” Lal said. “Not that India was divided, but the people, suffered.” The suffering was palpable for Zabada Sheikh, 51, who, until her father’s death, listened to his stories of Madar Kashmir fleeing at the age of eight to Pakistan, a year after partition. Sheikh, born in the Midlands to a mixed Hindu-Muslim family, instilled the idea that nothing was certain. There was a full suitcase on top of a closet, her parents living with the belief that they could be kicked out of the country at any moment. “I grew up with this feeling of insecurity that I think our parents had because my father had to leave his ancestral home,” Sheikh said. “I think we felt that as much as he loved England, at any moment he could be kicked out. They also instilled this insecurity in us.”
