States of being divided

Partition 1947: Uprooted and divided

"It took me a long time to realise that my family and I, like every other citizen of the current state of Bangladesh, were directly and indirectly a by-product of the Partition to the extent that even our daily struggles sometimes evolved around it," writes Meghna Guhathakurta.

Partition 1947: Do women have a country?

It was only the other day, some six decades after my mother's family left Pakistan, that I learnt about how they travelled to India in the aftermath of Partition.

Partition 1947 / From postmemory to post-amnesia

For both Pakistan and Bangladesh, the time between 1947 and 1971 was best forgotten.

Partition 1947 / University of Dhaka and the partitioning of Bengal

A recent and a very good historian of Bengal, Nitish Sengupta has observed that [in the mid-19th century] 'Nowhere else in the subcontinent were Muslims as worse off in Bengal, just as, paradoxically, few other communities derived as much benefit from British rule as the Bengali Hindus'.

Partition 1947 / In conversation with Ayesha Jalal

"The partition of India was effectively the partition of the two main Muslim-majority provinces, Punjab and Bengal. There was nothing inevitable or pre-determined about this."

Ghosts of 1947

Bangladesh stands out in postcolonial South Asia for its strikingly anomalous relationship to what neighbours consider to be the foundational event in the region's modern history—the 1947 partition of British India.

Partition 1947 / After the holocaust: Partition and Bangladeshi literature

The Partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947 has become indissolubly linked to horrific, haunting images of armed gangs or mobs attacking helpless groups of men, women and children trying to cross a border that had just been scratched on the map. Literature registers the shock in works that make harrowing reading.

Partition 1947 / Restorying Partition: Sabuha Khan

When Partition occurred Sabuha Khan's parents were divided on whether to leave Delhi and Rohtak permanently.

Restorying Partition: Akhilananda Dutta

Akhilananda Dutta comes from a family of doctors. Born in Dhaka in 1942 to a doctor and a housewife, he recalls that most of their family members were doctors at that time.

Partition 1947: How a nationalist movement turned communal

Who is to blame for the 1947 Partition of India and the large-scale violence that it triggered? There are accusations and recriminations.

Why this special issue on Partition?

Is history too much with us? In some sense, yes, but in its broader and deeper sense, no.

In conversation with Tanvir Mokammel

In an interview with Star Weekend, Tanvir Mokammel talks about the significance of 1947 in his films, the role of artists in documenting history and the amnesia surrounding Partition among Bangladeshi filmmakers.

How communal politics ruined agrarian society

First, when it came to the ecological question, the two-nation theory, on which the partition was claimed to be based, was muted as seen in Punjab and Bengal where the question of partitioning the water bodies took the centre stage. Second, the immediate aftermath of the partition left thousands of people dead and millions homeless and filled with gruesome trauma.