Instead of a usual post in this series, I have decided to attach an essay of mine answering the question ‘Was the Partition of India inevitable?’ As this essay covers the arguments of many books, articles and historians on a variety of different topics in relation to the causes Partition, I have been able to make many points about the importance of using oral history and memory to support historical research and to fill in the gaps of official narratives. Through my footnotes, there are also many books and articles referenced, and in a future post(s) I will compare two or three of these texts and analyse their arguments in more detail.
Was the Partition of India inevitable?
‘Children being thrown out of second-floor flats’. ‘People being speared to death’. ‘Muslims kill[ing] Hindus’ and ‘Hindus kill[ing] Muslims’. ‘All these bodies that were killed whether Hindus or Muslims were dumped on the main road…lying in a heap’.[1] These horrific scenes of violence witnessed by Shantanu Rai, a Hindu survivor of the Partition of India, help illustrate the fearful mass experience of one of the largest forced migrations of the 20th century.[2] The dislocation of up to 20 million people across the subcontinent poses the fundamental question: was the division of India in such a traumatic and decisive way unavoidable?[3]
Before exploring whether Partition was inevitable, it is crucial to define what I mean by the term. The Cambridge Dictionary defines the inevitable as ‘something that is certain to happen and cannot be prevented’.[4] Taking this further, when applied to a historical event, I take ‘inevitable’ to mean something that had to happen due to long-term historical causes, leaving no plausible alternatives. When discussing Partition, both national capitals pose ‘one-dimensional versions of the past’, arguing that in some form it did become inevitable by the mid-1940s due to entrenched religious nationalism and the development of Muslim separatism following repeated failures to achieve political compromise.[5] However, the form that Partition took, its speed, harrowing violence, and arbitrary division of communities, was not inevitable. These outcomes were shaped by the decisions made by the Indian and British elite and the haste with which the British exited India, and it is upon this basis that this essay will argue that the Partition was not inevitable.
Official narratives, particularly those produced by both nations’ state-sponsored historiography, often present Partition as the logical conclusion to growing religious tension and imperial exhaustion. In India, this took the form of secular, nationalist history promoted by institutions like the India Council of Historical Research. In Pakistan, the state produced Islamic nationalist narratives through bodies such as the Pakistan Historical Society and the National Institute of Historical and Cultural Research.[6] One of the earliest examples was the Pakistan Historical Board’s ‘A Short History of Hind-Pakistan’, published in 1955, which portrayed Muslim rulers in an extremely benevolent light.[7] One of the Board’s members, Ishtiaq Hussain Qureshi, also produced a later work, ‘A Short History of Pakistan’ in 1967, which structured the nation’s history as ideologically distinct from India’s due to Muslim rule.
However, revisionist accounts acknowledge that this scale of catastrophic violence was not inevitable but instead enabled, and even worsened, by deliberate state decisions. Such reflections are supported by the voices of those who lived through Partition. On a local level it becomes clear that many Indian people did not think such a division was inevitable or even necessary at all. Shantanu Rai ‘never thought the country could ever be divided’ and this expression of disbelief, rather than ideological conviction, suggests that for countless ordinary people, Partition was neither desired nor foreseen .[8] These insights are only made visible when one moves beyond a focus on the elite and begin to understand the human experience of history. For this reason, Urvashi Butalia’s work on historical memory becomes indispensable. She insists that ‘the way people choose to remember an event… is at least as important as what one might call the ‘facts’ of that history’.[9] Memory, though never pure or unmediated, directly challenges deterministic narratives by revealing how Partition tore through families, communities, and identities in ways that no one could fully predict.[10]
Gyanendra Pandey takes this further, urging historians to move ‘beyond providing a statement of the genesis’ and to instead explore ‘the new social arrangements, new consciousnesses and new subjectivities’ created by Partition.[11]He identifies a ‘wide chasm between the historians’ apprehension of 1947 and what we might call a more popular, survivor’s account of it’, highlighting how conventional historiography can obscure the lived, emotional realities of violence.[12] By listening to personal memories, we can uncover not only how people experienced Partition but also how they understood its causes. These interpretations can be just as, if not more, important than what is found in official documents or narratives.
Ultimately, then, in answering the question of whether Partition was inevitable, we must also ask inevitable for whom?
Religious Nationalism and Communalism
Many conventional histories of Partition trace its origins to the rise of religious nationalism in the early 20th century, presenting it as the tragic but equally unavoidable conclusion of decades of religious polarisation within communities. In the years preceding Partition, religious conflict had escalated, becoming more intense due to increasing awareness of differing religious identities[13]. Ian Talbot highlights how Indian nationalism and Hindu majoritarianism often became indistinguishable from each other, leading to the creation of other distinct religious identities.[14] Violent communal riots broke out during festivals like Holi or Eid, with a ‘more frightening ferocity’ following the end of the First World War. [15] The growing scale and regularity of this unrest suggest to some, that the Partition was not just a sudden solution imposed by the elite, but the culmination of deep-rooted societal tension.
The ideological roots of Hindu nationalism make it harder for religious nationalism to be dismissed as a short-term political response. V. D. Savarkar was a political activist and writer who developed the Hindu nationalist political ideology of Hindutva; an attempt to culturally justify Hindu nationalism. Savarkar’s writings reveal an intellectual foundation for Hindutva long before 1947, suggesting Hindu nationalism was not merely a reaction to Indian National Congress failures or Muslim demands. Savarkar argued that ‘Hindu religious categories’ were the natural basis of Indian unity and saw politics as the means for reclaiming ‘glory and humiliation’; concepts which were at the heart of Hindu identity.[16] His belief that Islam’s goals were inherently humiliating and incompatible with national unity, entrenched his religiously divisive views. However, despite this unambiguous ideology, the proposed practical implementation of it was flexible. Savarkar did not insist that all Hindus had to believe in the same religion or follow strict theological rules; rather he was more concerned with political unity. Hindu identity, in his view, could include other religious beliefs as long as they were committed to a shared political vision of unity. The lived experience of people like Kartar Singh further emphasises the fluidity of religious and cultural identities pre-Partition:
‘Before Partition, Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs had close relationship of love and mutual respect for each other…When I was a child, I use to eat and sleep in my Muslim friends’ houses…we spent a good part of our lives with Muslims. Our religions were also intermingled…There was a time when I could offer Muslim prayer. It was more like a culture than a religion for us.’[17]
The adaptability of both the ideology of Hindutva and the everyday experiences of religion, demonstrate that even deeply ideological forms of nationalism were not destined to produce a rigid two-nation divide.
Framing religious nationalism as organically escalating into a two-nation divide can also be challenged by the ‘uncertainties, ambiguities and interdeterminancies’ of late colonial politics.[18] Ayesha Jalal warns against the ‘flawed teleology’ of assuming Partition was the endpoint of religious tensions, illustrating this idea through the character of Mohammad Ali Jinnah; originally a member of the Congress and later the leader of the Muslim League and key architect of Pakistan.[19] Rather than being a committed religious separatist, Jinnah’s turn to communal rhetoric was a political tactic and from an ideological perspective for many Muslims he ‘was most emphatically not their Great Leader’.[20] Sayeed Hasan Khan, a 16 year-old in Lahore during Partition, recollected that Jinnah ‘said that the Muslims should vote for a lamppost, if it was contesting elections on the Muslim League ticket’, reflecting the extent to which loyalty to the League was prioritised over genuine ideological conviction.[21] Muslim League candidates were sometimes even met with hostility, and ‘Nationalist Muslims’ who remained loyal to the Congress faced community ostracism.[22] This lack of unity among followers of the same religion makes the idea of Partition’s inevitability questionable. Evidently, communalism was not a universally agreed upon solution nor was it solely driven by underlying religious divisions.
Jinnah’s refusal to precisely define Partition illuminates his political use of religious nationalism. This strategic decision allowed Pakistan to function more as symbolic leverage in negotiations, rather than a blueprint for a theocratic state. Even ‘fervent supporters’ of the League were later shocked by the territorial reality of Partition.[23] As S. H. Khan later reflected from 1950s Karachi:
‘I analysed the whole tragedy of Partition and the two-nation theory… I came to the conclusion that Jinnah never wanted Partition; his rhetoric from 1940 to 1947 left no other choice and pushed him to the point of no return.’[24]
It was only a decade after Partition that people like S. H. Khan began to realise that Partition was born from political momentum that had become too difficult to reverse. Jinnah’s initial aim was to secure equal political rights for Muslims and prevent them from continuing to be, as stated in a speech in 1945, part of a ‘hopeless minority’, not necessarily to create a geographically separate homeland.[25] Had there been greater consensus and clarity amongst the Muslim community regarding the demand for Partition, it is logical to question whether there would have even been a separate Pakistan at all.[26]
The ambiguity of Jinnah’s rhetoric had dangerous consequences when combined with heightened communal tensions. Although it was intended to demonstrate Muslim solidarity, Jinnah’s call for a ‘Direct Action Day’ in August 1946 ignited considerable violence in Calcutta. It spiralled into mass communal riots, resulting in estimated causalities of up to 3000 people.[27] Mountbatten even asked Jinnah, in a meeting in April 1947, why he had called for direct action in the first place. Jinnah ‘denied that [he] had ever instigated bloodshed’ shifting the blame onto the Congress.[28] If Jinnah had been more precise in his language, these tensions would not have escalated to the same degree. Thus, this violence was not solely a product of religious nationalism, but also due to the unpredictable effect of ambiguous language from political leaders like Jinnah.
The Congress leadership’s failure to meaningfully re-engage Muslim voters after their return from wartime imprisonment in June 1945 inadvertently reinforced the perception of the party as a ‘Hindu’ organisation.[29] Jawaharlal Nehru, Vallabhbhai Patel, and Abdul Kalam Azad had been imprisoned during the 1942 Quit India Movement, a mass civil disobedience campaign launched by the Congress demanding an end to British rule during the Second World War.[30] While the leadership was imprisoned, the Muslim League mobilised the wide Congress support base that had grown since the end of the First World War and capitalised on their support. Therefore, once the Congress returned, it found itself unable to recover its lost ground, especially in key Muslim-majority regions in North and West India. Equally, the Congress’ grassroots strategies, including tax resistance and neighbourhood mobilisation, had embedded political activism into the layout of Indian cities by the 1940s. These strategies were then developed and exploited by sectarian groups during Partition, reinforcing the view that Partition was the product of political failures which unintentionally exacerbated religious divisions.
It is important, though, to understand that although religious nationalism was weaponised by the elite, it also shaped local communal identities. Stephen Legg’s research into Delhi’s mohallas, reveals how these spatially separated identities became intertwined with daily life.[31] By 1947 the administration already viewed neighbourhoods as either Hindu or Muslim, and events like ‘Pakistan Day’ were described by the CID as being celebrated in ‘Muslim mohallas’.[32] The notion of entire neighbourhoods identifying with only certain political events emphasises how religious nationalism was structural at the local level. The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh’s (RSS) militarised training routines in Delhi, where above 1000 volunteers collected every morning, support the view that by January 1947 many religious nationalist groups were actively preparing for the ‘inevitable’ communal violence.[33] Whilst this does suggest that at least some of the violence did stem from long-term religious nationalism, by this point, the outbreak of riots was mostly political and no longer tied to religious festivals. Religion was being directly politicised by all political parties across the spectrum through the invocation of Islamic fatwas, encouragement of direct action and the use of religious propaganda.[34] For many, the violence during Partition marked the first time religious difference was truly foregrounded in everyday life. Khaleeque Anjum, a resident of Delhi, recalled:
‘We never felt that the Hindus were different from us. This difference struck us for the first time during Partition 1947, when the riots started. Before these riots, I was not conscious of my identity as a Muslim.’[35]
The experience and memory of everyday residents thus suggests that Partition and the divisions it was said to be the solution for were politically rather than ideologically driven.
The fact that the very same mohallas that divisions developed within also encouraged solidarity highlights the counter-narrative that runs alongside the narrative of Partition violence. As Legg documents, there were ‘small acts of cross-communal hospitality and resistance’, such as hotels sheltering vulnerable families and student activists delivering milk to mothers afraid to leave their homes.[36] These moments were not just anomalies pre-Partition but continued amidst the violence. ‘Many people carried out unusually brave, heroic and humanitarian acts’, and risked their lives to save neighbours and sheltered the vulnerable despite their differing religious communities.[37] Various Hindu-Muslim unity leagues, peace brigades, volunteer-run ambulance services and acts of mercy and charity complicate the idea of all-encompassing violence during the worst moments of Partition.[38] The very presence of these spontaneous, anonymous and often fleeting acts undermines the narrative that treats religious division as irreversible. Nationalism and compassion seemed to coexist as ordinary individuals attempted to balance political and religious allegiances with their personal relationships.
British Imperial Strategy
The role of Britain’s imperial strategy in shaping Partition is often downplayed in favour of framing 1947 as the inevitable collapse of a fragile, religiously divided India. However, this assumption overlooks how British political decisions, rooted in both colonial strategies and postwar exhaustion, intensified already present communal divides.
The foundations of colonial rule had always rested upon the logic of ‘divide and rule’. After the distress of the Indian Rebellion of 1857, in which Hindus and Muslims fought together in an uprising against British authority, British officials initiated the period of the British Raj. In an attempt to prevent a consequent demonstration of unity across religious and regional lines, Lord Elphinstone’s dictum‘Divide et impera was an old Roman maxim, and it shall be ours’ began to shape British policy.[39] The 1909 Morley-Minto Reforms, for instance, codified religious differences into political structures by introducing the provision of separate electorates for Muslims.[40] Ramsay MacDonald’s 1932 Communal Award then extended this logic to other groups like Sikhs and Europeans, whilst also increasing the number of provinces that offered separate electorates.[41] These policies actively reinforced communal and religious identity as the basis for political representation. Even the creation of the Muslim League in 1906 had been encouraged by the British to counter the growing influence of the Congress. The British helped the League take advantage of the imprisonment of their opponents by granting them access to resources, patronage, and publicity for League leaders. British officials went as far as formalising this advantage in 1940 with the League’s Lahore Resolution which gave them firm ground for their demand for a separate Muslim state.[42] In promoting such exclusivist claims, the British created the perception of India as two irreconcilable nations. This view became increasingly difficult for the Congress to counter, meaning these British decisions entrenched Hindu-Muslim divisions. By the 1940s, it could be argued that Partition appeared to be a natural outcome of decades of deliberate communal division under British rule.
However, Partition’s devastating violence and displacement was not structurally inevitable; it stemmed in large part from the hasty British withdrawal. Mountbatten’s decision to advance independence from June 1948 to 15 August 1947, cutting 10 months from the already brief time allotted, was reckless and the consequences of this decision were staggering. A border dividing hundreds of millions of people was drawn in just five weeks by Sir Cyril Radcliffe, ‘an English jurist who had never set foot on the soil of either province’.[43] The Radcliffe Award was also deliberately withheld from Indian leaders until three days after independence. This decision was shaped by the ‘political imperatives of the statesmen in Delhi and London’, and was calculated to limit British culpability for the allegedly inevitable violence.[44] The language of Britain’s departure was also filled with contradictions. Speeches on the handing over of power by ‘June 1948’ were ‘masterpieces of obfuscation’ since the real transfer was announced within days.[45] The word ‘Pakistan’ was never even mentioned by Mountbatten or Attlee, and this ‘diplomatic frippery’, as Khan calls it, confused the process even more.[46] The human consequences of such carelessness are captured in the words of Lila Ma’shed:
‘They look alike, speak the same language, dress alike, eat the same food… I don’t understand why this was necessary… We could have lived in peace in Bengal.’[47]
Her disbelief captures the absurdity of a political decision imposed with such haste that it ignored the lived realities of those it affected. It was unmistakably not communal hatred alone but instead, the secrecy and the prioritisation of British optics that escalated confusion and violence on the ground.
The logistical absurdity of the plan further challenges any sense of inevitability. Power was handed over to the new dominions without defining their exact borders or implementing any contingency plans for feeding and housing ten million refugees.[48] No British officers or troops remained to attempt to limit the chaos and violence that was bound to happen, emphasising that the violence of Partition was not just a side effect of communalism, but enabled by the absence of British accountability.[49] Radcliffe’s boundary divided pilgrimage sites, supply chains and families and had no legitimacy on the ground, since it was an ‘imaginary’ line with no structures to enforce it. The new states were expected to impose order with no preparation or military backing and the added confusion of differing maps being leaked by local newspapers.[50] This absence of logistical planning suggests that the chaos of Partition was a direct consequence of imperial failures, not an unavoidable result of religious antagonism.
Portraying British policy as a calculated exit strategy, however, misrepresents the chaotic reality. As Stanley Wolpert argues, British leaders themselves seemed aware that their withdrawal with such haste would spark additional violence, further challenging the idea that this violence was purely the result of religious hatred.[51] In a passionate speech to the House on 6 March 1947, Churchill, one of the empire’s staunchest defenders, condemned this cowardice and moral abdication:
‘Many have defended Britain against her foes. None can defend her against herself. We must face the evils that are coming upon us, and that we are powerless to avert. We must do our best in all these circumstances and not exclude any expedient that may help to mitigate the ruin and disaster that will follow the disappearance of Britain from the East. But, at least, let us not add – by shameful flight, by a premature, hurried scuttle – at least, let us not add, to the pangs of sorrow so many of us feel, the taint and smear of shame.’[52]
Postwar Britain was economically exhausted and struggling with domestic reconstruction making the government reluctant to extend military or administrative resources to a dissolving empire. Mountbatten’s hurried schedule was as much a response to imperial fatigue as it was to communal tensions. From this perspective, Partition’s violence and scale of displacement was not preordained but enabled by British failure to take responsibility in a moment of complete crisis.
One could still argue that Britain’s rushed exit was not entirely avoidable. Recruitment to the Indian Civil Service had collapsed by 1943, and by 1946, many British officials were seeking postwar opportunities in places outside of the fading empire.[53] For Mountbatten, the overriding priority became avoiding civil war, even if that meant sacrificing careful planning. However, this only reinforces the argument that it was not ideological or communal rage that made Partition violent, but in fact the British refusal to stay and manage the outcome of their own empire’s collapse. When asked decades later even Mountbatten himself would admit his failure. When asked how he felt about his role in India, Mountbatten admitted to BBC’s John Osman that he had ‘got things wrong’ and decades later his bluntness about his work as the last viceroy of India only increased.[54] Yet this argument only explains why Britain had to leave, and not why it chose to do so in such a reckless manner.
While the long-term effects of colonial ‘divide and rule’ policies undoubtedly exacerbated communal divisions and made Partition appear increasingly plausible, the form in which it unfolded was not inevitable, but the direct result of imperial and political mismanagement.
Conclusion
The question of Partition’s inevitability cannot be answered without interrogating whose reality we consider and which sources we prioritise. While elite political narratives tend to frame Partition as the outcome of irreconcilable communal tensions or a pragmatic solution to imperial decline, personal testimonies and revisionist narratives challenge this deterministic view. As this essay has demonstrated, the speed, scale and unprecedented violence of Partition was not inevitable. Rather, it was shaped by political failures of the Indian National Congress, Muslim League and British government, and above all the reckless nature of the British withdrawal.
David Gilmartin calls on historians to move beyond linear explanations and to recognise Partition as a historical event when ‘multiple realities’ collided.[55] Partition was a chaotic, improvised event driven by unresolved tensions between elite politics and religious and communal identities. The tragedy of such an event lies in how little it was understood, even by those enacting violence. As Peter van de Veer reminds us ‘there is no true story of violence… no plot, no narrative, only traces that lead nowhere’.[56] Violence of this magnitude disrupts historiographical coherence and any attempts to rationalise it within neat causal frameworks. Joya Chatterji highlights how the surgical imagery used by British and nationalist leaders to justify Partition has further distorted our understanding of it. Presenting Partition as a ‘surgery’ that is ‘painful and bloody’, yet still ‘serves a purpose’, offers a false sense of legitimacy to the series of catastrophic decisions made by elite leaders.[57]
Partition, in the form that it played out, was not the inevitable endpoint of decades of religious animosity. Partition was a political choice, carried out under immense pressure, enabled by imperial neglect and rationalised in the years following 1947 through misleading and carefully constructed narratives. By listening to the memories and emotional admissions of survivors of this violence, one cannot accept the narrative that Partition was inevitable.
[1] Andrew Whitehead, India: A people partitioned, BBC World Service, 5 June 1997, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p034m6mt (accessed 13 July 2025).
[2] Vazira F. Y. Zamindar, ‘India–Pakistan Partition 1947 and Forced Migration’, in Encyclopaedia of Global Human Migration, ed by Immanuel Ness (New Jersey: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), https://doi.org/10.1002/9781444351071.wbeghm285.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Cambridge Dictionary, Inevitable, Cambridge University Press, https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/inevitable (accessed 10 July 2025).
[5] Yasmin Khan, The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), p. 203.
[6] Khan, The Great Partition, p. 5.
[7] Husain Mahmud, A Short History of Hind-Pakistan (Karachi: Pakistan Historical Society, 1955), https://archive.org/details/dli.ernet.502979/page/n3/mode/2up (accessed 12 July 2025).
[8] Whitehead, India: A people partitioned
[9] Urvashi Butalia, The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India (New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 1998), p. 8.
[10] Ibid.
[11] Gyanendra Pandey, Remembering Partition: Violence, Nationalism and History in India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 50.
[12] Pandey, Remembering Partition, p. 6.
[13] Khan, The Great Partition, p. 19.
[14] J. Haynes, ‘Book reviews’, Commonwealth & Comparative Politics, vol. 40, no. 1 (2002), pp. 109–139, https://doi.org/10.1080/713999577.
[15] Khan, The Great Partition, p. 19.
[16] Vikram Visana, ‘Glory and Humiliation in the Making of V. D. Savarkar’s Hindu Nationalism’, The Historical Journal, vol. 66 (2023), p. 185; Ibid, p. 165.
[17] Ahmad Salim (compiled and edited), Reconstructing History: Memories, Migrants and Minorities (Islamabad: Sustainable Development Policy Institute, 2009), p. 38.
[18] Ayesha Jalal, The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim League and the Demand for Pakistan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. xvi.
[19] Ibid.
[20] Ibid, p. 36.
[21] Salim (ed.), Reconstructing History, p. 83.
[22] Khan, The Great Partition, p. 36.
[23] Ibid, p. 44
[24] Salim (ed.), Reconstructing History, p. 84.
[25] Speech delivered by Muhammad Jinnah, 6 December 1945, CAB 127/136, The National Archives, Kew, https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/education/resources/indian-independence/jinnah-calls-pakistan/ (accessed 10 July 2025).
[26] David Gilmartin, ‘Partition, Pakistan, and South Asian History: In Search of a Narrative’, The Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 57, no. 4, (November 1998), p. 1072.
[27] Military report on the Calcutta riots, 24 August 1946, WO 216/662, The National Archives, Kew, https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/education/resources/indian-independence/calcutta-riots/
[28] Stanley Wolpert, Shameful Flight: The Last Years of the British Empire in India (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 140.
[29] Khan, The Great Partition, p. 36.
[30] ‘Quit India Movement’, Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/event/Quit-India-Movement (accessed 14 July 2025)
[31] Stephen Legg, ‘A Pre‑Partitioned City? Anti‑Colonial and Communal Mohallas in Inter‑War Delhi’, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, vol. 42, no. 1 (2019), pp. 170–187
[32] Legg, ‘A Pre‑Partitioned City?’, p. 182.
[33] Legg, ‘A Pre‑Partitioned City?’, p. 184.
[34] Khan, The Great Partition, p. 34.
[35] Salim (ed.), Reconstructing History, p. 39.
[36] Legg, ‘A Pre‑Partitioned City?’, p. 186.
[37] Khan, The Great Partition, p. 138.
[38] Khan, The Great Partition, p. 140.
[39] Shashi Tharoor, The Partition: The British game of ‘divide and rule’, Al Jazeera, 10 August 2017, https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2017/8/10/the-partition-the-british-game-of-divide-and-rule (accessed 11 July 2025).
[40]Morley-Minto reforms, Oxford Reference, Oxford University Press, https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803100210169 (accessed 13 July 2025).
[41] H. M. Nugent, ‘The communal award: The process of decision‐making’, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, vol. 2, no. 1–2 (1979), pp. 112–29
[42] Dr. Chhawang Subba, ‘The Lahore Resolution of 1940 and Its Impacts on the Muslim League Policy’, International Journal of Research and Analytical Reviews, vol. 9, no. 1 (March 2022), pp. 949–953.
[43] Wolpert, Shameful Flight, p. 1.
[44] Joya Chatterji, ‘The Fashioning of a Frontier: The Radcliffe Line and Bengal’s Border Landscape, 1947–52’, Modern Asian Studies, vol. 33, no. 1 (February 1999), p. 195.
[45] Khan, The Great Partition, p. 2.
[46] Khan, The Great Partition, p. 3.
[47] Whitehead, India: A people partitioned
[48] Wolpert, Shameful Flight, p. 11.
[49] Ibid.
[50] Map speculating on a possible division of India from the Daily Herald newspaper, 4 June 1947 (CAB 21/2038), The National Archives, Kew, https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/education/resources/indian-independence/map-possible-partition/
[51] Wolpert, Shameful Flight, p. 132.
[52] Winston Churchill, Orders of the Day – India (Government Policy), 6 March 1947, vol. 434, column 678, https://hansard.parliament.uk/commons/1947-03-06/debates/9a7eb32f-53d0-4536-bfa2-6a8db4d12ac4/India(GovernmentPolicy) (accessed 14 July 2025).
[53] Khan, The Great Partition, p. 14.
[54] Wolpert, Shameful Flight, p. 2.
[55] Gilmartin, ‘Partition, Pakistan, and South Asian History’, p. 1070.
[56] Ibid.
[57] Chatterji, ‘The Fashioning of a Frontier’, p. 242.
telling tales 