Wikipedia Deep Dive

Partition of India

12 min read

At the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947, somewhere between twelve and twenty million people became refugees. In the span of a single night, the subcontinent that had been British India split into two new nations—India and Pakistan—and the largest mass migration in human history began. Hindus and Sikhs fled westward. Muslims fled eastward. And in the chaos between, hundreds of thousands—perhaps as many as two million—died.

This wasn't just a bureaucratic redrawing of lines on a map. It was the violent birth of nations, written in blood and displacement, whose wounds still haven't healed nearly eight decades later.

The Rehearsal Nobody Recognized

The seeds of partition were planted four decades earlier, in a decision that seemed purely administrative at the time. In 1905, Lord Curzon, the Viceroy of India, divided the Bengal Presidency—the largest administrative unit in British India—into two parts. Eastern Bengal and Assam would have a Muslim majority. The remaining Bengal province would be Hindu-majority.

Curzon had practical reasons. Bengal was simply too large to govern efficiently—a problem that had vexed colonial administrators since the 1830s. But the effects were anything but practical.

The Hindu elite of Bengal owned much of the land that Muslim peasants farmed in the east. They protested vigorously. The Bengali middle class, known as the Bhadralok, saw themselves being politically diluted, outnumbered by Biharis and Oriyas in the new configuration. They interpreted Curzon's move as punishment for their growing political assertiveness.

What followed was the Swadeshi movement—meaning "buy Indian"—a boycott of British goods that would become a template for future resistance. But something else emerged too, something darker: political violence targeting civilians. Young men in groups like Jugantar began bombing buildings, staging armed robberies, and assassinating British officials.

Their rallying cry was "Bande Mataram"—"Hail to the Mother"—a phrase from a song that invoked a mother goddess standing variously for Bengal, for India, and for Kali, the Hindu goddess of destruction. The slogan spread from Calcutta to villages and towns across Bengal as English-educated students returned home.

Here was the first hint of the fault line to come. A political slogan wrapped in explicitly Hindu religious imagery. A protest movement that, whatever its stated goals, felt exclusionary to Muslims.

The Birth of Separate Paths

The Muslim elite watched the protests with growing unease. In 1906, they approached Lord Minto, the new viceroy, with a request that would shape the subcontinent's future: separate electorates for Muslims.

The idea seems arcane now, but it was revolutionary. Rather than all voters in a district choosing from the same candidates, Muslims would vote separately for Muslim representatives. Hindus would vote for Hindu representatives. The electorate itself would be divided along religious lines.

They had their reasons. As former rulers of much of India before British conquest, they saw themselves as deserving special consideration. They pointed to their cooperation with British authorities. And underneath it all ran a fear: in a democracy based purely on numbers, the Hindu majority would always win.

That same year, the All-India Muslim League was founded in Dacca—now Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh. Though initially small, with only five hundred to eight hundred members, it represented something new: a political organization defined by religion, arguing that Muslims needed separate representation because they were, in some fundamental way, a separate people.

Counting Creates Reality

None of this would have been possible without a peculiar colonial tool: the census.

The 1871 Census of British India was the first to systematically count populations by religion and region. For the first time, everyone could see exactly where Muslims formed majorities. The numbers became political facts, and political facts became political weapons.

In the decades that followed, tensions accumulated like pressure in a fault line. The Arya Samaj, a Hindu reform movement, organized "reconversion" events to bring Muslims "back" to Hinduism—as if Islam were merely a deviation from some original state. Cow protection movements, ostensibly about animal welfare, became flashpoints for communal violence, since Muslims traditionally slaughtered cows for food.

The Hindi-Urdu controversy seems almost quaint now—a dispute over which script should be used for the shared language of northern India—but it wasn't about letters. It was about identity. Hindi, written in Devanagari script, was associated with Hindus. Urdu, written in Persian script, was associated with Muslims. Choosing a script meant choosing a side.

And then there was the novel. Anandamath, written by Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, featured Hindu warriors battling Muslim oppressors. It contained the song that gave the independence movement its rallying cry: Bande Mataram. Every time that slogan was shouted in the streets, some Muslims heard not "independence for India" but "Hindus against Muslims."

The Great War Changes Everything

World War One transformed the relationship between Britain and India in ways no one anticipated.

1.4 million soldiers from the British Indian Army fought in the conflict. News of their service—fighting and dying alongside soldiers from Britain, Canada, and Australia—spread across the globe through newspapers and a new medium called radio. India's international profile rose dramatically. The country became a founding member of the League of Nations in 1920. Indian athletes competed in the Antwerp Olympics that same year.

If Indians could die for the Empire, the thinking went, surely they deserved a greater voice in governing it.

Something unexpected happened at the 1916 Congress session in Lucknow. The Indian National Congress, dominated by Hindus, and the Muslim League, representing Muslim interests, found common ground. The catalyst was an unlikely source: the Ottoman Empire.

The Ottoman Sultan held guardianship over Islam's holiest sites—Mecca, Medina, and Jerusalem. When Britain went to war against the Ottomans, some Indian Muslims began questioning British "religious neutrality." Britain had already reunified Bengal in 1911, a decision many Muslims saw as a betrayal.

The result was the Lucknow Pact. The Muslim League supported the Congress demand for greater self-government. In return, Congress accepted separate electorates for Muslims in provincial and national legislatures. A young lawyer from Bombay named Muhammad Ali Jinnah helped broker the deal. He would later become the founder of Pakistan.

At the time, it seemed like a breakthrough—proof that Hindus and Muslims could work together toward independence. In retrospect, it institutionalized the very division it seemed to bridge. Separate electorates meant separate political paths. Once you accepted that Muslims needed their own representatives, you had already accepted that they were, in some essential way, different.

The Reforms That Weren't Enough

The Government of India Act of 1919, known as the Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms, gave Indians their first real taste of legislative power. Some government departments—public health, education, local government—were transferred to Indian ministers and legislatures. Others—defense, foreign affairs, police—remained under British control. It was a halfway measure, designed to satisfy demands for self-rule without actually granting it.

The voting pool expanded, but remained tiny: only ten percent of adult males could vote at the national level, and most of those were still illiterate. The British carefully balanced the scales. Rural candidates, seen as more cooperative, got more seats than urban ones. Special seats were reserved for landowners, businessmen, college graduates, and religious minorities.

The principle of communal representation—separate seats for Muslims, Sikhs, Christians, Anglo-Indians, and Europeans—was enshrined more deeply than ever. Each group voted for its own representatives. The electorate was permanently fractured along religious lines.

The Theory That Became Reality

At some point, an idea emerged that would make partition inevitable: the two-nation theory.

The theory held that Indian Hindus and Muslims were not merely different religious communities but different nations entirely. They had different cultures, different histories, different destinies. They could not share a single country.

The theory had strange parentage. British officials like Theodore Beck, who helped found the Muslim League, promoted it because they believed democratic majority rule would disadvantage Muslims—and a divided India would be easier to control. Hindu nationalists like Vinayak Damodar Savarkar promoted their own version, arguing in his 1923 pamphlet that India was fundamentally a Hindu nation. If Muslims were a separate nation, the implication was clear: they didn't truly belong.

The Arya Samaj leader Lala Lajpat Rai proposed a "clear partition of India into a Muslim India and a non-Muslim India" in 1924, following Hindu-Muslim riots in Kohat. He had lost faith in the possibility of unity.

In 1937, Savarkar made it explicit at the Hindu Mahasabha conference: "India cannot be assumed today to be a unitarian and homogenous nation. On the contrary, there are two nations in the main: the Hindus and the Muslims."

And in 1940, Muhammad Ali Jinnah—the same lawyer who had brokered the Lucknow Pact promoting Hindu-Muslim cooperation—declared that religion was the determining factor in defining Muslim nationality. The Muslims of India were not a minority within a larger nation. They were a nation unto themselves, deserving their own state.

The logic was relentless. If Hindus and Muslims were two nations, they needed two countries. If they needed two countries, the subcontinent had to be divided. If it had to be divided, lines had to be drawn. And once the lines were drawn, people found themselves on the wrong side.

The Impossible Geometry

The partition itself was an exercise in impossible geometry. India's Muslim population wasn't concentrated in one region—it was scattered across the subcontinent, with major concentrations in the northwest and the northeast, separated by a thousand miles of Hindu-majority territory.

Pakistan would be born as a geographical absurdity: two wings separated by the entire width of India. West Pakistan and East Pakistan, connected only by air and sea, speaking different languages, sharing little but religion. The arrangement would last only twenty-four years before East Pakistan broke away to become Bangladesh in 1971.

Two provinces—Bengal in the east and Punjab in the west—had to be carved up district by district, based on whether each had a Muslim or non-Muslim majority. Communities that had lived together for centuries found themselves suddenly separated by international borders.

The British Indian Army was divided. The Royal Indian Navy was divided. The Indian Civil Service was divided. The railways were divided. Even the central treasury was split between the two new nations.

The Indian Independence Act of 1947 set the date: midnight on August 14-15. The British Raj would dissolve. Two new dominions would take its place.

What the Numbers Cannot Capture

The scale of what followed defies comprehension. Somewhere between twelve and twenty million people fled their homes. The uncertainty in that number—a gap of eight million human beings—tells you something about the chaos.

Hindus and Sikhs fled what was becoming Pakistan. Muslims fled what was becoming India. Trains crossed the new border carrying only corpses. Villages were burned. Families were separated forever. Women were abducted. Children disappeared.

The death toll is similarly uncertain: somewhere between several hundred thousand and two million. We will never know the true number. In the midst of such violence, no one was counting.

The violence created what the diplomats call an "atmosphere of hostility and suspicion" between India and Pakistan. That's a bloodless way of describing a wound that has never healed. The two nations have fought four wars since partition. They remain rivals to this day, both now armed with nuclear weapons.

What Partition Was Not

It's worth being precise about what the term "partition" means historically, because the subcontinent's geography has shifted many times.

Partition does not refer to Bangladesh's secession from Pakistan in 1971, though that division was in some ways a consequence of partition's impossible geography.

It does not include the earlier separation of Burma—now Myanmar—and Ceylon—now Sri Lanka—from British India's administration.

It does not cover the integration of the princely states—the hundreds of semi-autonomous kingdoms that had existed under British suzerainty—into India or Pakistan, though that process was contentious and sometimes violent. The disputes over Hyderabad, Junagadh, and Jammu and Kashmir continue to echo today. Kashmir remains divided between India and Pakistan, a frozen conflict that periodically thaws into violence.

French India was gradually incorporated into India between 1947 and 1954. Portuguese Goa was annexed in 1961. Sikkim, Bhutan, Nepal, and the Maldives were separate political entities that remained unaffected.

Partition refers specifically to the division of British India itself on August 15, 1947—the drawing of lines through Bengal and Punjab, the splitting of institutions, the creation of two nations where one colonial possession had been.

The Weight of History

Understanding partition requires understanding how contingent it was. At each step—the 1905 division of Bengal, the formation of the Muslim League, the Lucknow Pact, the Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms, the embrace of the two-nation theory—decisions were made that made the next step more likely but never inevitable.

Different choices might have led to a unified India, or a confederation, or a peaceful separation. Instead, the subcontinent got what it got: a midnight birth in blood, a permanent divorce, and an argument that continues nearly eighty years later.

When you read about the Substack article's theme—"Eerily close, the dead"—the partition is perhaps the most literal example of death's proximity one can imagine. Millions of people who had been neighbors became refugees. Hundreds of thousands who had been living became dead. And the survivors carried their dead with them, eerily close, into the new nations that rose from the ashes.

The violence was not incidental to partition. It was what partition meant, in practice, for ordinary people. The elegant legal language of the Indian Independence Act—dominion status, transfer of power, constitutional arrangements—meant nothing to someone fleeing a burning village or searching for a missing child.

That gap between the official version and the human reality is perhaps the most important thing to understand about the partition of India. It was simultaneously a legal procedure and a catastrophe. An act of parliament and a crime against humanity. A founding moment and a wound that won't close.

The nations it created still live with its consequences. And the dead remain, eerily close.