Partition

'Lives torn asunder.' The children of Indian Partition, 75 years on

From CNN Opinion

A small girl is woken in the night. The family is to travel immediately from their idyllic home near Lahore, in what is current-day Pakistan, to India.

Along the way she sees overturned bullock carts, burning villages and decapitated bodies floating down the canal.

Elsewhere, a young boy is also about to embark on a journey -- heading in the opposite direction, from India to newly formed Pakistan.

Traveling by truck, he sees bloated vultures feeding on bodies by the roadside. His small hands hold a gun.

Seventy-five years later -- and now in their 80s -- the partition of India remains seared into each of their memories.

In August 1947, the Indian subcontinent won independence from the British empire. The bloody partition hastily divided the former colony along religious lines -- sending Muslims to the newly formed nation of Pakistan, and Hindus and Sikhs to newly independent India.

An estimated 15 million people were uprooted and between 500,000 and 2 million died in the exodus, according to scholars.

Tensions between India and Pakistan today are "a result of the manner in which the two countries were born, the violent Partition," said Guneeta Singh Bhalla, founder of the 1947 Partition Archive, a community-based archive which has documented over 10,000 oral histories, based in Delhi, India and Berkeley, California.

"Without understanding Partition, resolving the past and healing our wounds, we cannot move forward," she told CNN.

Partition also holds important lessons beyond India and Pakistan. "We are seeing a rise of political polarization -- left v. right, religious v. non-religious, or one religion v. another -- in many places around the world," said Bhalla. "A lot of the rhetoric we are hearing now is similar to the kind of rhetoric in the public realm that preceded the 1947 Partition-era violence," she added.

"Partition is an example of the real human cost of this sort of polarization in society," Bhalla said.