The Partition of India and Pakistan

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Lord Mountbatten, 4 August 1947

Families were cut to half as men were killed leaving women to fend for themselves.

Punjab during partition 1947

Punjab during partition 1947

Leaders

Picture taken by BBC during the partition shows a street filled with dead bodies, where vultures having their feast. Looking at the tragic scene Bourke-White's biographer Vicki Goldberg, writes “The street was short and narrow. Lying like the garbage across the street and in its open gutters were bodies of the dead.

Old Sikh man carrying his wife. Margaret Bourke-White. 1947. Over 10 million people were uprooted from their homeland and travelled on foot bullock carts and trains to their promised new home.

Photo of a railway station in Punjab. Many people abandoned their fixed assets and crossed newly formed borders.

Refugee Train

Men, women and children who died in the rioting were cremated on a mass scale. Villagers even used oil and kerosene when wood was scarce.

Rural Sikhs in a long ox-cart train heading towards India. Margaret Bourke-White. 1947. The migration was a massive exercise in human misery, wrote Bourke-White later.

Train to Pakistan. Delhi 1947

Two Muslim men carrying an old woman in a makeshift Doli or palanquin. 1947

With the tragic legacy of an uncertain future, a young refugee sits on the walls of Purana Qila, transformed into a vast refugee camp in Delhi.

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