The Big Read
Unearthing Partition’s Narrative Despite the atrocities that took place during it, Dr. Jennifer Leaning, who has led the Mittal Institute's 1947 Partition Project since its inception in 2016, says it's the "kindness of strangers" that has shone through Partition’s darkness.
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n expert in public health and rights-based responses to humanitarian crises, Dr. Jennifer Leaning, Senior Research Fellow at the Harvard FXB Center for Health and Human Rights and retired Professor of the Practice at Harvard T.H Chan School of Public Health, has spent her nearly 50-year career at the intersection of war and disaster, atrocities and conflict. Despite witnessing some of the most challenging instances of human behavior, it is a ‘kindness of strangers’ motif that motivates her work. She applies this approach to the Mittal Institute’s 1947 Partition Project, which she has led since its inception in 2016. The Project studies the 1947 Partition of British India, which ended a 300-year British rule and allowed self-determination for countries in the subcontinent. In a demographic upheaval that often turned violent, the population of the subcontinent was divided into Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan and directed toward the new countries of West Pakistan (present-day Pakistan) and East Pakistan (which is
now Bangladesh) according to religious beliefs. The subsequent mass movement throughout the region is often referred to as the ‘greatest mass movement of humanity in history,’ During this forced migration, millions of people fled their homes to find safety in areas across the new border. Tragically, many never completed the journey because of sectarian attacks en route. Yet in the midst of profound tragedy, Dr. Leaning notes the courage and compassion of the millions who were forced to relocate. “Partition is a deeply tragic episode in the birth story of these new nation states,” she explains, “and it is also a story of harried officials and charitable organizations who scrambled to respond and sustain the desperate millions who were in need.” This is what she emphasizes most about the experience of Partition. Dr. Leaning will share her decades of Partition work in a new edited book, a collection of essays convened by the Mittal Institute with contributions from scholars in all three major affected countries in the subcontinent.
The Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute, Harvard University
