The Government of India decided in 2021 to observe 14 August every year as “Partition Horrors Remembrance Day” to commemorate the pain and suffering endured by the people during the Partition of India in 1947. Even by the most conservative estimates, two hundred thousand people were killed, while seventy-five thousand women were abducted and raped. India put the number of abducted women at 33,000 Hindu and Sikh women, while Pakistan estimated the number of abducted Muslim women at 50,000. Around twelve million people crossed the borders in both directions. Pertinently, some scholars have described Partition as the “dark side of independence.”

Mridula Sarabhai, a freedom fighter and fiercely independent minded was an eyewitness to the horrors of Partition. General Thimaya described her as the bravest man in Indian army. She worked tirelessly for the recovery of abducted women, refusing to simply follow any official line and, on several occasions, even differing with Mahatma Gandhi whose own life was cut short by an act of violence.

Partition PlanFeminist historiography has brought to the fore the ways in which women were tortured and killed during Partition. Urvashi Butalia, in her book The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India, raises an important question about the Partition of India. She argues that there is no institutional memory of Partition: the state has not seen fit to construct memorials or mark particular places, as has been done in the case of Holocaust memorials or memorials commemorating the Vietnam War. The explanation for this lapse, she believes, is not difficult to find. She asks how Partition could be memorialized by the state without the state recognizing its own complicity.

Lord Mountbatten presided over a meeting to discuss the Boundary Award on 16 August 1947. The meeting was attended by representatives of the Congress and the Muslim League. The decision of Sir Cyril Radcliffe, who chaired the three boundary commissions for Punjab, Bengal, and the Sylhet district of Assam, was made public only on 17 August 1947, when the three awards were........

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