Partition's Borders

The partition of British India illustrates how the decisions of a few people over a very short period of time can have lasting impacts on the lives of billions of others for many generations. The momentous and calamitous event was enacted within a two-month period in the summer of 1947 and relied heavily on the judgement of a single man, Sir Cyril Radcliffe, who had never even visited India prior to his appointment as the head of the Boundary Commission that would decide the permanent borders for India, Pakistan, and eventually Bangladesh (Chatterji 1999). To perform this mammoth task, the commission had only six weeks and Radcliffe started drawing the line on the map without any empirical knowledge of the people living along that borderscape (van Schendel 2005; Whyte 2002). The result of this cartographic scissoring was not only the mass migration and violence immediately following Partition, with over a million deaths and over ten million more people displaced, but also the long-term impacts on the lives of those who had no choice but to live with the new territorial limits to their idea of home. The quickly made, and often ill-informed, decisions of that fateful summer 70 years ago continue to shape the daily practices, politics, religion, economy, and culture of both those who reside in South Asia today and those who have migrated to distant homes. Those imagined lines on the map are the increasingly hardened borders over which guards nervously eye each other, on which civilians risk their lives to work their land, and about which politicians experience cartographic anxiety over how firmly they control the allegiance of the people and territory (Krishna 1994). Those lines also are the departure point for the millions of people who have set out in search of better opportunities elsewhere in South Asia, the Middle East, Europe, North America, and the South Pacific.

South Asian borders have a complex and significant history, but are at times overlooked by scholars in the field of border studies and allied disciplines.