Separation anxiety

As Europe remembers Passchendaele, India and Pakistan recall Partition, just 70 years ago, when Britain so hastily abandoned its Indian empire, exhausted by the costs of war in the world and troubled by the upsurge in violence between Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs as the campaign for Britain to Quit India took root. In Partition Voices on Radio 4 (produced by Mike Gallagher, Tim Smith and Ant Adeane), we heard from those who witnessed the bloody terror that broke out across the subcontinent as it was divided on religious, not political, ethnic or communal grounds, many of whom fled to Britain to make new lives for themselves. Harun, who was a child in Delhi, remembers the smell of excrement and the sound of women crying as his family waited in a place of refuge until their safe passage out of the country could be secured. Ten million people were forced to move away from their ancestral homes and to find a new life across the artificial borders separating India and Pakistan that had been finalised by Cyril Radcliffe, a lawyer from England who had never before visited India and who was appointed in June to draw up those borders just a few weeks before the declaration of Indian independence at the stroke of midnight on 14/15 August 1947.

In the first of three programmes we also heard from Pamela, whose father worked for the Raj. She was riding on her Raleigh bike to the market in Calcutta along a busy highway when a Muslim activist pushed her off it into the swirling mayhem of cars, carts, scooters and rickshaws. ‘I could have been killed,’ she recalled. She and her mother and sister were soon sent back to Britain, never to return. Kenneth, whose family managed jute mills in the city, remembered his boyhood love of fishing in the Hooghly and that he got so used to seeing dead bodies floating by he just pushed them out of the way with his rod.