Nations & States
Partition and the Birth of Pakistan
The Punjab border crossing, 1947
1366 AH / 1947 CE
Educational historical reconstructionWhere
The Punjab, on the new India-Pakistan border
31.6000, 74.6000 · View on OpenStreetMap
Background
In August 1947, as nearly two centuries of British rule in India ended, the subcontinent was partitioned into two independent states: a secular but Hindu-majority India and a Muslim-majority Pakistan, the latter created in two wings, west and east, as a homeland for India's Muslims and the realisation of the demand made by the Muslim League under Muhammad Ali Jinnah. The independence of two great nations was a historic achievement, but the way the borders were drawn, hastily, through the mixed provinces of the Punjab and Bengal, set off one of the largest and most violent forced migrations in human history. As many as fourteen to eighteen million people fled across the new lines, Muslims toward Pakistan and Hindus and Sikhs toward India, in fear of being left on the wrong side; horrific communal massacres swept the border regions, women were abducted in great numbers, and trains crossed the frontier filled with the murdered. Estimates of the dead range from several hundred thousand to as many as two million. For the Muslims of South Asia, Partition was at once the triumph of a homeland gained and the trauma of a bloodletting and uprooting whose scars run through the region to this day. This scene depicts a Punjab border crossing in 1947, the new Pakistani flag, the refugee columns moving both ways with their bundles, and an overcrowded train at the line.
What you see
A flat, hot agricultural plain of canals and wheat-fields stretches under a hazy sky, with a new boundary post and barrier cutting arbitrarily across the open farmland. This is the Punjab, divided by a line drawn in 1947.
A new national flag, green with a white stripe and a white crescent and star, flies at the crossing; a new state has just come into being here.
Long columns of refugees on foot, with bullock-carts and bundles of belongings on their heads, stream across the border in opposite directions; an entire population is on the move both ways.
An overcrowded steam train stands at the line, its roof and footboards packed with people fleeing; the trains of 1947 became infamous as both the means of escape and the sites of massacre.
A new flag raised over a border that whole peoples are crossing in fear marks at once a triumph, the creation of a homeland, and a catastrophe, one of the largest and bloodiest forced migrations in history.
Further reading & cross-references
Eyewitness accounts, memoirs and oral histories of Partition (1947 and after): The vast body of survivor testimony from all communities; used for the exodus, the trains and the human experience. Confidence high.
Yasmin Khan, The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan (2007): Standard modern academic history. Used for the partition process, the migration and the violence. Confidence high.
Histories of the Pakistan movement and the work of the Boundary Commission: Used for the creation of Pakistan, Jinnah and the Muslim League, and the hasty drawing of the Radcliffe Line. Confidence high.
Contemporary photographs and records of the 1947 migration (cross-reference): Period photographs of the refugee columns and trains constrain the depiction; material detail only.
Guess places like this in GeoSiyer
Drop into a 360° scene from Islamic history and pin where — and when — it happened.
Play GeoSiyer