Partition deaths exceeded estimated figure, says Harvard researcher

Amritsar, October 12

The Partition of India in 1947 is considered as one of the most devastating events of mass migration in world history. The events leading to the Partition brought grave consequences to the region, resulting in documentation through several books and studies.

The Partition Museum in Amritsar hosted a book launch of ‘The 1947 Partition of British India: Forced Migration and its Reverberations’, based on a study conducted by Harvard scholars. It was published by the Lakshmi Mittal South Asia Institute at Harvard university. While most studies and documents on the subject put the estimated number of displacements during Partition around 15 million, Professor Jennifer Leaning, who led the study at Harvard on the Partition and is Senior Research Fellow at the Harvard Center for Health and Human Rights, said that the number is much higher.

“The number of people impacted by the Partition was much larger than previously thought. Over 18 million people were forced to migrate in 1947 and more than three million went missing —which included children. This is larger and more devastating than any migration of recent times,” she said while introducing the purpose of the study and its findings. She said that the study took several months and in-depth analysis by scholars from India, Pakistan and Bangaldesh to explore far-reaching impact of the events in 1947. “It’s very important to document and understand the impact of the Partition and the displacement pattern that continued even after several years after 1947,” she said. She shared that the process of research for the book involved tracing history of displaced families and documenting their journey, the division on religious lines and several other factors that came into effect in the aftermath of the partition.

Kishwar Desai, the Chair of The Arts And Cultural Heritage Trust, which set up, and runs the world’s first-of-its-kind Partition Museum in city, said, “As the objects and documents given by Partition affected families displayed at the Museum show —the Partition led not just to the loss of lives but also the loss of a syncretic culture. It led to the division of libraries, museums, music, armies and so on. There were so many tangible and intangible aspects of the division that still felt. This loss, which is well documented in the museum, was devastating to a newly independent nation.”

While Prof Leaning appreciated the work of preservation of memories of 1947 being carried out at the Partition Museum, she also stressed that this work of documentation is essential.

AAP leader Kunwar Vijay Pratap Singh, MLA from North Amritsar, who attended the event as special guest, released the book and spoke about loss experienced by many families and the cruel impact of Partition on abducted women. Another panelist, Hitesh Hathi, who now runs the South Asia Institute at Harvard, which was instrumental in the research, said those responsible for the Partition did not offer any humanitarian response in the aftermath. ‘The erstwhile colonisers, the British, were largely not involved in the humanitarian response required in 1947. It was mostly addressed by the people and a few welfare agencies.