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Chandigarh: For most Punjabis born after Independence – and certainly for anyone under the age of 60 today – Partition is almost impossible to comprehend. The scale of the upheaval, the speed and cynicism with which ordinary lives were overturned and the sudden collapse of communities that had coexisted for generations, belong to an era difficult to imagine in contemporary India.

Yet for those of us who grew up in Punjab in the decades that followed, Partition was never something we learnt from history books. We simply grew up with it.

It lived in family conversations, surfaced at weddings and funerals and emerged unexpectedly whenever parents and older relatives gathered together. Most households seemed to possess their own story of loss, escape, friendship, betrayal or survival and, growing up in Punjab through the Fifties and Sixties, one absorbed all these memories almost by osmosis.

Of all the Partition stories I heard growing up, the ones that remain most vivid today are also the most personal. They ranged from Lahore, then the vibrant capital of undivided Punjab, to our ancestral village of Dera Baba Nanak on the banks of the Ravi River in Gurdaspur district, situated today on the International Border with Pakistan.

Revered by Sikhs as the place associated with Guru Nanak’s final years before his passing at adjoining Kartarpur in 1539, the village found itself at the centre of an altogether different drama in mid-August 1947, when for two extraordinary days neither it nor its inhabitants knew whether they belonged to India or Pakistan.

As Independence approached on August 15, a strange stillness settled over Dera, and for the next 48 hours confusion reigned.

Nobody knew whether the village, or indeed the whole of Muslim-majority Gurdaspur district – and the largest in Punjab – would become part of India or Pakistan, as everyone anxiously awaited the Radcliffe Award, the hurried boundary decision that would formally divide both Punjab and Bengal. The fate of millions rested on the judgement of Sir Cyril Radcliffe, a British barrister who had never visited India and who, armed with little more than a fountain pen, a few outdated maps and ethnic surveys, and five weeks of preparation, was tasked with partitioning an entire subcontinent and deciding the destiny of millions.

Family folklore recalled a community holding its breath as rumours raced through the village, faster than facts could catch up. Some claimed Pakistani officials would arrive within hours; others insisted Indian troops were already on their way. Government officials quietly disappeared from Dera, while families hurriedly packed their belongings, not knowing whether they would wake the next morning in India or Pakistan.

That uncertainty was particularly acute at Dera’s railway station, a critical link connecting Amritsar to Sialkot and onwards to Lahore. Security was reinforced around the platforms, signal cabins and outlying buildings, as armed bands appeared on both sides of the Ravi and reports filtered in of massacres on trains elsewhere in Punjab.

Finally, on August 17, two days after formal independence and the creation of........

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