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The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica Last Updated: Aug 16, 2024 • Article History Table of Contents
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partition of India, division of British India into the independent countries of India and Pakistan according to the Indian Independence Act passed by the British Parliament on July 18, 1947. Set to take effect on August 15, the rapid partition led to a population transfer of unprecedented magnitude, accompanied by devastating communal violence, as some 15,000,000 Hindus, Sikhs, and Muslims rushed to cross the hastily demarcated borders before the partition would be complete. Estimates of the number of people who died during the partition range from 200,000 to 2,000,000. The partition left an indelible mark on the national consciousness of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, and its legacy continues to influence the countries’ citizens to this day.
Direct British rule of India began in 1858 as a consequence of the Indian Mutiny, a rebellion against the paramountcy of the East India Company. Direct rule was intended to increase Indian representation while preserving British imperial interests, but continued aggravations and injustices in the following decades created an increasingly adamant independence movement. By the 1920s, programs of noncooperation and civil disobedience were placing pressure on the British to grant India self-governance; in 1930 the Indian National Congress (Congress Party), led by Jawaharlal Nehru, promulgated the Purna Swaraj resolution calling for complete independence.
By 1930 a number of Indian Muslims had begun to think in terms of statehood for their minority community separate from a state with a Hindu majority, although many of the most important leaders of the Muslim community, such as Mohammed Ali Jinnah and the Aga Khan III, continued to envisage a single federation of all Indian provinces. Jinnah, the secular leader of the All India Muslim League, hoped that the leadership of the Congress Party would accommodate Muslims’ concerns of a Hindu bias in its high command. By documenting as many incidents as it could gather in reports published during 1939, the league hoped to demonstrate how Congress ministries were insensitive to Muslim demands or appeals for jobs, as well as to their redress of grievances, and had shown partiality toward the Hindu majority.
The divide intensified after the viceroy Lord Linlithgow (governed 1936–43) informed India’s political leaders and populace that they were at war with Germany and Hindu and Muslim leaders split on whether to support the war effort. The first meeting of the Muslim League after the outbreak of World War II was held in March 1940 in Punjab’s ancient capital of Lahore. The famous Lahore Resolution, later known as the Pakistan Resolution, was passed by the largest gathering of league delegates just one day after Jinnah informed his followers that “the problem of India is not of an inter-communal but manifestly of an international character.” The league resolved, therefore, that any future constitutional plan proposed by the British for India would not be “acceptable to the Muslims” unless it was so designed that the Muslim-majority “areas” of India’s “North-Western and Eastern Zones” were “grouped to constitute ‘independent States’ in which the constituent units shall be autonomous and sovereign.” The rifts deepened further when the Congress Party launched the Quit India movement in 1942 to call for immediate independence and British withdrawal; the Muslim League opposed the call because immediate independence would preclude autonomy for Muslims.
After World War II ended, demands for independence were louder than ever, and the 1945 British parliamentary victory of Clement Attlee, who pledged to grant India independence, lent greater certainty to British withdrawal from the subcontinent. With the stakes rising, the simmering Hindu-Muslim tensions erupted. Jinnah called for a “direct action day” on August 16, 1946, which spiraled into communal rioting that left thousands dead in what was later remembered as the “Great Calcutta Killing.” The event was met soon after with reprisals in a deeply divided Bengal, and the cycle of violence later spread to other provinces.
In March 1947 Louis Mountbatten arrived in India as its last viceroy of the British Empire. He had instructions to oversee the decolonization of the country—ideally, the devolution of power to an Indian government that would include the whole subcontinent—and wide freedom of action to end the British raj on whatever terms he deemed wisest. Mountbatten soon became convinced that the differences between the Muslim League and the Congress Party were irreconcilable in the near term, that speed was of the essence because of the real risks of mutiny among Indian troops or the outbreak of civil war, and that a partition was the only expedient option for independence. Mountbatten’s plan for the partition of India was announced on June 3, 1947.
Britain’s Parliament passed the Indian Independence Act on July 18, 1947. It ordered that the dominions of India and Pakistan be demarcated by midnight of August 14–15, 1947, and that the assets of the world’s largest empire—which had been integrated in countless ways for more than a century—be divided within a single month. Racing the deadline, the Boundary Commission, appointed by Mountbatten, worked desperately to partition Punjab and Bengal in such a way as to leave the maximum practical number of Muslims to the west of the former’s new boundary and to the east of the latter’s. It consisted of four members from the Congress Party and four from the Muslim League and was chaired by Cyril Radcliffe—who had never before been to India. With little agreement between the parties and the deadline looming, Radcliffe made the final determination of the borders, which satisfied no one and infuriated everyone.
Dividing Punjab and Bengal, the provinces with a slim Muslim majority, caused tremendous problems, as the demographic distributions of those regions were heterogeneous and diverse. The new borders ran through the middle of villages, towns, fields, and more. When Pakistan was created, East and West Pakistan were separated by about 1,000 miles (1,600 km).
The commission also effectively cut in half the large Sikh population in Punjab. The western half of the community reacted with great concern over potential Muslim rule: the Mughal emperors had persecuted the Sikh Gurus in the 17th century, and the legacy of that persecution remained deeply felt. Although the commission had placed Amritsar, the Sikhs’ most sacred city, under Indian dominion, many other important Sikh shrines and landed estates were set to become part of Pakistan. Some Sikhs of western Punjab tried initially to retain control over their estates by pushing out local Muslims, but their attempts were met with violent reprisals. Nearly the entirety of the Sikh community ultimately fled to areas that would become part of India.
The transfer of power was completed on August 14 in Pakistan and August 15 in India, held a day apart so that Lord Mountbatten could attend both ceremonies. With the birth of the two independent countries, the British raj formally came to an end on August 15, 1947.
The borders of the new countries were not published until August 17, two days after the end of British rule. This set the stage for an immediate escalation of communal violence in areas around the new borders. Many ordinary people did not understand what partition meant until they were in the middle of it, sometimes literally. If a border village was roughly evenly divided between Hindus and Muslims, one community could argue that the village rightly belonged to India or Pakistan by driving out or killing members of the other community.
As soon as the new borders were announced, roughly 15,000,000 Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs fled from their homes on one side of the newly demarcated borders to what they thought would be “shelter” on the other. Some people were able to take trains or buses from one country to another, but most were forced to flee on foot, joining refugee columns that stretched for miles. These columns were the target of frequent ambushes, as were the trains that carried refugees across the new borders. In the course of that tragic exodus of innocents, as many as 2,000,000 people were slaughtered in communal massacres (although scarce documentation left a wide range of estimates). Sikhs, settled astride Punjab’s new division, suffered the highest proportion of casualties relative to their numbers.
While the worst of the violence took place during the first six weeks of partition, the consequences of those weeks played out for decades. Even provinces that had initially escaped violence later saw outbreaks of conflict; for example, Sindh struggled to absorb large numbers of refugees (muhajirs) from India who, although Muslim, belonged to different ethnolinguistic groups from the local population. Disparities that arose from the hasty creation of Pakistan led ultimately to a devastating war in 1971 between its eastern and western provinces, which resulted in the independence of East Pakistan as Bangladesh. Territorial disputes between India and Pakistan, particularly the question of the Kashmir region, have also led to multiple wars. Moreover, tensions over the rights of Sikhs and the preservation of their communal integrity have also led to violent confrontations in India, most notably with the storming of the Harmandir Sahib in 1984 and the subsequent assassination of Indira Gandhi.
