States of being divided

States of being divided

Why this special issue on Partition?

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

6y ago

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.

6y ago

Partition 1947 / 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.

6y ago

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'.

6y ago

Partition 1947 / Separating a once historically indivisible people

"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."

6y ago

Partition 1947 / Manju Chakraborty

She says that when she visited Noakhali recently, she felt that both East and West Bengal are part of same culture. She would like to do away with the complex wires and visa system between two Bengals, she says.

6y ago

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.

6y ago

Partition 1947: The tears that still bind

Ten years ago I met Gazi in Bangladesh's Satkhira region, in a small island called Koikhali. He had come with his immediate family about 60 years back, at the stroke of midnight, with nothing but the clothes on his back.

6y ago

Pushpa Nangia

Pushpa Nangia was born in 1939 in Murree Hills, Rawalpindi. Her father was an engineer for the Military Engineering Services (MES) and her mother was homemaker. The Mukker family migrated from Nowshera to Delhi just a few days after the Partition, which also happened to be the day of Mrs Nangia's eighth birthday.

6y ago

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.

6y ago

Mahammad Appu

A special train was arranged for Mr Appu's family and all of the workers in his father's factory to migrate from Lucknow.

6y ago
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