Partition of Punjab, 1947: The Line Drawn in Five Weeks That Split the Land of Five Rivers

On 15 August 1947, the people of Gurdaspur woke up to celebrations, and to a puzzle. Nobody had told them which country they lived in. For two days, Pakistan’s flag flew there. Then, on 17 August, the new border was finally published. Most of Gurdaspur, it turned out, was in India.

Across Punjab, millions of people faced the same question, and many answered it with their feet. Over the following months, around 14 million people crossed a line that had not existed a few weeks earlier. Hundreds of thousands never made it.

This is the story of how the land of five rivers was cut in two.

Punjab in 1946 was a province of about 34 million people, counting its princely states: Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs, often living in the same villages, speaking the same language. In the elections that year, the Muslim League became the largest party but fell short of a majority, and Khizr Hayat Tiwana’s Unionists formed a coalition with the Congress and the Akali Dal.

The League agitated against it, and on 2 March 1947 Khizr resigned. Within days, the Sikh leader Master Tara Singh, who opposed Pakistan, raised the slogan Pakistan Murdabad outside the Assembly in Lahore. In March, violence broke out in Rawalpindi district, where Muslim mobs attacked Sikh and Hindu villages.

Britain had planned to leave by June 1948. The last Viceroy, Lord Mountbatten, brought it forward. On 3 June 1947, he announced on the radio that India would be divided, and that Punjab and Bengal would be split between the two new countries. Independence would come on 15 August. That left a little over ten weeks.

Some of the earliest horrors came in those spring months. In March 1947, the Sikh village of Thoa Khalsa near Rawalpindi was besieged for days. Villagers paid money under a white flag, and the attackers came back.

Rather than be captured, around 90 women jumped into the village well; accounts give numbers between 84 and 93. A newspaper at the time reported that only three were saved. One survivor, Basant Kaur, told her story to the historian Andrew Whitehead in Delhi in 1997, when she was 92.

This story includes deaths by suicide. If you or someone you know is struggling, call Tele-MANAS, India’s free mental health helpline, on 14416 or 1-800-891-4416, any time of day.

The man chosen to divide Punjab was Sir Cyril Radcliffe, a London barrister both Nehru and Jinnah accepted. He arrived in Delhi on 8 July 1947 and was given both the Punjab and Bengal boundary commissions. The Punjab commission had two judges nominated by the Muslim League and two by the Congress. They deadlocked, so Radcliffe decided alone.

His instructions were to follow contiguous majority areas, while taking account of other factors. Years later, he told the journalist Kuldip Nayar that time had been so short he could not do a better job. He also said he had nearly given Lahore to India, but changed his mind because Pakistan would otherwise have had no big city.

The hardest calls were in the middle of the province. Gurdaspur district was narrowly Muslim-majority, but three of its four tehsils, including Pathankot, went to India. Parts of Ferozepur district with Muslim majorities also went to India. Mountbatten held back the award until 16 August, the day after independence, and it was published on the 17th. Radcliffe had already left India.

I nearly gave you Lahore.

What followed was one of the worst outbreaks of violence of the 20th century, and it came from every community. Sikhs, Hindus and Muslims all killed and were killed, each often saying they were avenging horrors done elsewhere. Historian Ishtiaq Ahmed, who interviewed more than 350 survivors, argues the violence was organised by political groups on all sides, with police on both sides colluding.

Trains became the symbol of it. Trains arrived at Lahore and Amritsar carrying only the dead. Refugee trains were attacked in both directions: a train of Muslim refugees was massacred at Amritsar in September 1947, and trains of Hindu and Sikh refugees were attacked at Kamoke and, in January 1948, at Gujrat.

Millions walked instead, in huge columns called kafilas, moving slowly along the roads under armed escort, carrying everything they could. A special force of soldiers was set up to keep the peace in the border districts. It lasted 32 days, and British records later called it a largely vain attempt.

Women suffered in ways that took decades to be spoken about. Tens of thousands were abducted on both sides. The official claims were around 33,000 Hindu and Sikh women in Pakistan and 50,000 Muslim women in India; the writer Urvashi Butalia estimates about 75,000 in all.

Both governments agreed to find and return them. By the mid-1950s, more than 20,000 Muslim women had been recovered from India and about 9,000 Hindu and Sikh women from Pakistan. But many had married, had children, and did not want to go back to families who might reject them. Some were sent anyway. Jawaharlal Nehru publicly condemned families who refused to take back women who were returned.

One of the most famous stories is that of Boota Singh, a Sikh former soldier who rescued and married a Muslim girl named Zainab. Recovery teams sent her to Pakistan. He followed with their daughter, but she denied him in court, and he died by suicide in front of a train. Their story inspired the films Shaheed-e-Mohabbat Boota Singh and, loosely, Gadar.

The refugees who reached India were sent to camps. The biggest, at Kurukshetra, held between two and three lakh people in tents. Gandhi spoke to them on radio on 12 November 1947; the date is now marked as Public Service Broadcasting Day. The camp closed in April 1950.

Land was the next battle. Refugees from West Punjab had left behind about 5.7 million acres, but only about 4.5 million were available in East Punjab. A system of graded cuts took proportionally more from bigger holdings, ending the large estates. Having lost Lahore, East Punjab worked from Shimla until a new capital, Chandigarh, was built; it became the capital in 1953.

The new map changed Punjab forever. It lost Lahore and the rich canal colonies of the west, and its demand for a Punjabi-speaking state would grow until the reorganisation of 1966. Among the children of the camps was a boy who had lost his parents and siblings in the violence and later ran for India: Milkha Singh.

For decades, Partition was something families did not talk about. That has changed. The Partition Museum in Amritsar’s Town Hall opened in August 2017, built from objects and stories donated by families. The 1947 Partition Archive has recorded more than 12,000 survivor interviews. In 2021, India declared 14 August Partition Horrors Remembrance Day, a decision that also drew political criticism.

The most emotional symbol is the Kartarpur Corridor, opened on 9 November 2019 so Indian pilgrims could visit Gurdwara Darbar Sahib, where Guru Nanak spent his last years, just across the border. In January 2022, two brothers separated in 1947, Sikka Khan from Indian Punjab and Sadiq from Pakistan, met there for the first time in 74 years. The corridor has been closed since 7 May 2025, and in July 2026 the government told Parliament it would stay shut for security reasons.

Partition gave Punjab some of its greatest art. Amrita Pritam’s poem ‘Ajj aakhaan Waris Shah nu’ called on the poet of Heer to rise from his grave and see Punjab’s daughters weeping. Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan (1956), Bhisham Sahni’s Tamas and Bapsi Sidhwa’s Cracking India told it in fiction. On screen: Garm Hava (1973), Tamas (1988), Earth (1998), Train to Pakistan (1998), Shaheed-e-Mohabbat Boota Singh (1999) with Gurdas Maan, Gadar (2001) and Pinjar (2003).

It is tempting to tell Partition as a story of villains. The record does not allow it. People of every faith did terrible things, and people of every faith hid neighbours, walked strangers to safety, and lost everything. The line was drawn in a hurry by men who would not have to live with it.

For Punjab, 1947 is not history in a textbook. It is a grandmother who never spoke about the well, a grandfather who still remembered the name of his village in Lyallpur, and brothers meeting in Kartarpur after 74 years. The least we can do is tell it honestly.