The Partition of 1947: The Trains, the Wells, and the Line Drawn in Five Weeks

Cyril Radcliffe arrived in India for the first time on 8 July 1947. He was a London barrister with no knowledge of the subcontinent, which the British government considered a qualification, since he could be presented as impartial. He was given five weeks to draw the border that would divide Punjab and Bengal between two new states. He never went back. He declined his fee, burned his papers, and reportedly feared he would be shot by both sides if he returned.

The line he drew displaced between ten and twenty million people, the largest mass migration in human history. Estimates of the dead range from several hundred thousand to two million.

The trains

Partition's most enduring image is the refugee train. Whole communities boarded carriages heading east or west depending on their faith, carrying whatever survived the packing of a single night. Some trains crossed safely. Others arrived at Lahore or Amritsar in silence, every passenger dead, a message painted on the side by the killers. Railway staff on both sides came to dread the ghost trains, and the phrase entered the vocabulary of the subcontinent permanently.

Our print The Train of Exodus depicts one of these journeys: the overcrowded carriages moving through a landscape that a stranger's pen had divided weeks earlier.

The wells

The quieter horror belongs to the wells of Punjab. In villages across the province, as mobs approached, women jumped or were sent into the wells by their own families to avoid abduction and assault. In the village of Thoa Khalsa in March 1947, more than ninety women drowned themselves in a single well. Survivors later recalled that the well filled before all of them could die.

These stories were barely spoken of for decades. Oral history projects in the 1990s, particularly the work of Urvashi Butalia, finally recorded them from ageing survivors. The Wells of Punjab renders the scene as the survivors remember the aftermath: a well at dusk, rural and still, carrying everything in its silence.

Why we tell it plainly

Partition is often narrated as a tragedy without authors, a spontaneous madness. The record is less forgiving. A colonial power that had ruled for two centuries scheduled its departure in a hurry, announced the border two days after independence so the celebrations would not be disturbed, and left thirty thousand troops to police a province of thirty million people in flames. The madness had a timetable.

Both prints belong to our Azadi collection, which documents the colonial period from the record: the famine, the looted treasuries, the rebellions, and the freedom that arrived at midnight with a bill attached.