The 1947 Partition of British India

RESEARCH The 1947 Partition of British India

A research project that seeks to develop a rich and empirically grounded understanding of the 1947 Partition of British India by exploring its demographic and humanitarian consequences.

/ Project Leads JENNIFER LEANING SHUBHANGI BHADADA

/ Contributors ORNOB ALAM DIANE ATHAIDE TIARA BHATACHARYA UMA CHAKRAVARTI MARIAM CHUGHTAI MEENA HEWETT ZEHRA JUMABHOY NADHRA S.N. KHAN TARUN KHANNA SANJAY KUMAR KARIM R. LAKHANI RAHUL MEHROTRA RIMPLE MEHTA OMAR RAHMAN NAVSHARAN SINGH RUIHAN WANG RITA YUSUF

The Mittal Institute’s research project on the 1947 Partition of British India explores many of the unanswered questions that surround the demographic and humanitarian consequences of this largest instance of forced migration in world history. Under the direction of Jennifer Leaning, Senior Research Fellow at the FXB Center at Harvard University and retired Professor of the Practice of Health and Human Rights at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and through its affiliation with the Mittal Institute, the project has expanded to become an international and interdisciplinary project that aims to deepen understanding of the 1947-48 mass displacement and its myriad of consequences.

Expanding Scholarship and New Directions

In their research on this project, scholars and researchers from across the subcontinent have drawn from a variety of sources including demographic analyses, archival records, collected narratives, urban geography, historical architecture and contemporary art. This data has allowed researchers to construct multi-layered understandings of the intense stress that such a cataclysmic crisis of forced migration imposes upon a population and the complex social adaptations that may follow the initial crisis.

Collecting Narratives and Crowdsourcing Memories

Tarun Khanna, Director of the Mittal Institute and Jorge Paulo Lemann Professor at Harvard Business School, participated in this project by enlisting Karim Lakhani, Charles Edward Wilson Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business School, to collaborate with him. Together, they collected and analyzed more than 2,300 oral narratives from survivors of Partition across the three affected regions of the subcontinent (now Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan). The narratives were collected by using a modified form of crowdsourcing with the help of volunteer ambassadors. These focused on outreach to poor populations and underrepresented voices, spanning gender, religion and caste,

Historical images capture the Partition of British India.

This is the ‘granddaddy’ of humanitarian response. There is a tradition of human concern that shaped the humanitarian response arising out of the Partition of British India that is unique in its shape, rooted by culture and traditions, but similar and in some ways more magnificent than many of the humanitarian responses we’ve now been able to muster.

—JENNIFER LEANING

with demographic groups such as Muslims in India; Hindus and Sikhs in Pakistan; Biharis in Bangladesh; and Parsis, Dalits and Christians.

This collection of essays related to Partition studies constitutes the first wherein experts from the three modern nation-states–Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan–have actively collaborated in the research and writing to develop a mixed and fraught account of Partition and its consequences. These contributions serve to cast a light, both somber and uplifting, on the enormous challenges Partition forced upon these societies, just as they were emerging from generations of colonial rule into a postwar world depleted of resources and robust capacities to help.

The 1947 Partition of British India: Forced Migration and Its Reverberations will be published by SAGE Publications India Pvt. Ltd. in late summer of 2022. It contains 10 chapters written by 19 authors from Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, the United Kingdom, and the United States, and is edited by Jennifer Leaning and Shubhangi Bhadada. These chapters are divided into three overarching sections: Migration and Relief in the 1947 Partition of British India; Memories of Partition; and Cities, Art, and Architecture. Contributors include Uma Chakravarti and Navsharan Singh (India); Nadhra Khan (Pakistan); Ornob Alam, Omar Rahman, and Rita Yusuf (Bangladesh); Zehra Jumabhoy (United Kingdom); Rahul Mehrotra, Tarun Khanna, Karim Lakhani, and Jennifer Leaning (United States).