The past is never dead. It’s not even past”. William Faulkner’s famous line could have been written for India’s Partition. In 1947, the subcontinent awoke to freedom – and to one of the most harrowing human tragedies in modern history. Two nations were born, but in the labour of that birth, over fourteen million people were displaced and as many as two million lost their lives. What should have been the dawn of independence became a night of chaos. For those who lived through it, the trauma was not a paragraph in a history book; it was the sudden absence of home, the neighbour who became a stranger overnight, the hurried bundling of belongings into cloth sacks, the smoke of burning villages on the horizon, and the unmarked graves of loved ones.

For the generations that followed, it remains an inheritance of silences and half-told stories, carried in the pauses of conversation at family gatherings, in the unfamiliar nostalgia for a city across a border, and in the names of relatives no one has met. In 2021, Prime Minister Narendra Modi declared 14 August as Partition Horrors Remembrance Day. The purpose was not to reopen old wounds or deepen divisions, but to ensure that the pain, displacement, and human cost of that moment in history are never forgotten. Such remembrance is not an indulgence in grief but a necessary act of moral and civic responsibility, one that guards the present against the repetition of the past.

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The Partition of India remains the largest forced migration in recorded history. The British withdrawal, formalised through the Indian Independence Act, drew a hurried and arbitrary line across Punjab and Bengal with little regard for the human consequences. Entire communities were split overnight, and the rhythm of life that had endured for centuries was abruptly and violently broken. Hindus, Sikhs, and Muslims alike – farmers in Multan, shopkeepers in Lahore, artisans in Dhaka – were caught in the gears of political decisions made far away in London and........

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