The partition of India usually emphasizes Punjab and Bengal. These two regions experienced the most horrific violence, the largest dislocation of population, and the greatest injury of partition. Partition, however, was not restricted to those regions, even if those are the regions with the most traumatic memories. In fact, what we do not see when the mainstream talks about partition, is how ordinary people experienced disruption throughout the subcontinent from the deserts and villages of western Sindh to the gentle hills of Assam from princely states to thousands of small towns far removed from political urban centers. The lives of everyday people during the partition are often unrecognized. Fragmentary evidence, or silence, of everyday people’s experiences of partition are significant reminders of the traumatic experiences of partition that we are not even talking about.
In the case of Sindh, the partition essentially uprooted a community that had existed there for centuries. The Sindhi Hindus, once part of the cultural and commercial life of the province, now found themselves on the other side of the border. They were required to move to India, often fleeing with only memories of their original homes and the language they bore with them. In contrast to the Punjabis and Bengalis, Sindhis did not have a separate state in India; they were dispersed to cities such as Mumbai, Ajmer, and Ulhasnagar and required to rebuild their lives from scratch. Their dislocation was less violent than the slaughter of Punjab, but it was equally permanent in the reality that it erased their being in their homeland. To this day, Sindhis remember partition not as bloodshed, but as a story of loss and exile, that a community was dislocated from the Indus and scattered like seeds across India and beyond.
The North-East also shared in the burden of partition, although it is rarely discussed. When Sylhet voted to join East Pakistan, thousands of Hindu families had to depart from their fields, schools, and temples. The residents of Barak Valley especially from towns such as Karimganj and Silchar were before long confronted with a border that divided not merely geography, but also a self-understanding. Families were abruptly shattered, with brothers on one side and sisters on the other. The violence of partition in Sylhet was not an analogous story, since it was a subsequent rendition to the larger stories of partition, but it continues to echo today in anxieties of language and identity in Assam and Tripura.
The effects of the partition were felt in Gujarat, too. The residents were stunned, resulting in public displays of violence, civil disturbance, and military intervention. For residents living in Junagadh, these months of vacillation must have felt like a period of dislocation, disorder, and fear, even if the decision to assimilate Junagadh into the Indian Union caused celebration nationwide. In Hyderabad, a much longer period of confusion followed, as the Nizam’s aspirations for independence conflicted with the desires of newly unified post-partition India, which wished Hyderabad to also unified with post-partition India. Although Hyderabad did not join India until 1948 over a year after the partition all of the anticipated communal devastation, refugee crises, and political disarray that was part of the post-1947 storyline also ominously appeared in Hyderabad.
Way out west, in Baluchistan and the Northwest Frontier Province, partition created dilemmas for communities that had long standing familial ties to both Indian and Pakistan. For many of the Hindus and Sikhs of Quetta and Peshawar, leaving their havelis, businesses, and schools, which had been in their families for generations, for India, became reality. Refugee colonies in Rajasthan, Delhi, and elsewhere, became their new homes as they set about rebuilding their lives, even while mourning the cultural richness they left behind. In Kashmir, as mentioned earlier, matters took a more violent turn than elsewhere when tribal raiders, unleashed by Pakistan, invade the state, ultimately forcing Maharaja Hari Singh to seek the assistance of India. This set the stage for decades of conflict and along the way, thousands of the displaced were Kashmiri Pandits and Muslims, caught up in their political indecision.
Even the South, which we usually think of as unaffected by partition, experienced aftershocks. There were refugees in Madras and Bangalore from Sindh, Punjab, and Bengal, which altered the demography and economy of the population. Tamil Nadu also sheltered Tamils from Burma who sought safety during the Second World War and became stateless in the upheaval of partition. Their stories too were absorbed into the larger refugee crisis of the late 1940s and remained invisible in the mainstream history of independence.
Partition was not only about borders, but layers of homes, people, and identities. It resonated in every inch, every pocket, every corner of India, even if the violence was different; and the scale of tragedy was different. For those who lived outside of Punjab and Bengal, their trauma was often one of exile, fear, or slow erasure, rather than slaughter. Even still, their suffering was equally real. Remembering the many myriad grave and forgotten stories from Sindh or Sylhet or Junagadh or Hyderabad or Baluchistan allows us to conceive of the partition as a multi-dimensional disaster that ruptured the entire subcontinent and not a two-dimensional disaster.
India gained independence in conjunction with this partition a moment of celebration overshadowed by significant human loss. To recall only Punjab and Bengal itself denies the voices of others who lost their homes, language, and livelihoods in 1947. Those stories demand to be told and listened to, not just to illustrate the human resilience of individuals but also because it is important for future generations to hear, and for all of us to remember, that history is never individual or confined by borders. History extends broadly, far, and deep like the deep and lasting scars of partition itself.