Partition of the Punjab

A line drawn in five weeks

Cyril Radcliffe, a British barrister who had never set foot in India, was given roughly five weeks to divide 175,000 square miles of territory containing some 88 million people. The Punjab and Bengal awards were published on 17 August 1947 — two days after independence, so that for two days people celebrated without knowing which country they were in.^3,5

The Punjab was the hardest case and the Sikhs the hardest-placed community within it. They were roughly a seventh of the province, concentrated in the central districts, and nowhere a majority large enough to claim territory outright. Their shrines, their land and their people lay on both sides of any line that could be drawn.¹

What it cost

Estimates of the dead across Partition run from 200,000 to two million, with most scholarly work settling somewhere between half a million and a million.⁴ Around 14 million people were displaced. The violence in the Punjab was the worst anywhere — massacres of refugee columns and of trains, whole villages destroyed, and the mass abduction of women on every side.

Essentially the entire Sikh population of West Punjab moved east. This was not a majority migration or a large one: it was total. Whole communities that had lived in Lahore, Rawalpindi and Sheikhupura for centuries ceased to exist there within months.^1,2

What was left behind

The particular cruelty for Sikhs is geographic. Nankana Sahib, where Guru Nanak was born, fell on the Pakistani side. So did Kartarpur, where he spent his last eighteen years and died. So did Lahore, where Guru Arjan was executed, and Panja Sahib, and several hundred other gurdwaras.

The faith’s beginning and its founder’s grave ended up in a country its community had just fled, behind a border that would be closed for most of the following seventy years. Amritsar and Anandpur remained in India. The chronicle this site follows was cut in half by a line drawn in five weeks.

Many of the smaller village shrines were simply forgotten — remembered now, if at all, through pre-1947 Gurmukhi books that list them.

Afterwards

Partition is the hinge of the modern Sikh story. It made Punjab a border province and Sikhs a border people. It scattered a population that had been overwhelmingly rural and rooted, and it is a substantial part of why there are large Sikh communities in Britain, Canada and beyond today.¹

It also created a seventy-year ache with a very specific object, which is why the opening of the Kartarpur corridor in 2019 — four kilometres of road to a shrine visible across the fields — produced the reaction it did.