Recording the Day India and Pakistan Split in Partition
When India and Pakistan became two separate countries, it reshaped world history. Now an Austin podcaster is telling the personal stories behind that severing.
By Richard Whittaker, Fri., Aug. 12, 2022
Imagine waking up and being told that you, your friends, your family, have a month to pack up and move across the country. Not just that, but when you get to whatever destination you're assigned, you'll be a citizen of a new nation, and the border will close behind you forever.
This is what happened in 1947, when the collapsing British empire cut its occupied lands in South Asia into two states, India and Pakistan. Known as "partition," it was a landmark event in 20th-century geopolitics, but also a wellspring of personal stories, many tragic and untold. It's those stories that Austin writer and podcaster Neha Aziz has recorded 75 years later for her new series for I Heart Media simply titled Partition.
Even though she has lived most of her life in Texas, in many ways Aziz still sees herself as Pakistani. Born in Karachi, her family moved to Arlington when she was child, but she was raised in the culture and language of the nation of her birth. She said, "I didn't grow up eating meatloaf and mashed potatoes. When we weren't eating a rice dish, we were eating something with naan." At the same time, she was also very aware of not trying to stand out in her very white suburb. "Being a Muslim in the South, being 11 when September 11 happened, I wasn't really like, 'Let's look at my culture!'"
It wasn't until she attended UT-Austin as an undergrad and joined a South Asian sorority that she found herself in a more diverse community. Then, in 2017 she took her first trip back to Pakistan since childhood, and like so many people when they find themselves among family and friends, she went to the mall. In the upscale waterfront Dolmen Mall Clifton, she got a surprise history lesson. There was an interactive installation, "Home1947," by the two-time Oscar-winning documentarian Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy. It was an eye-opening experience for Aziz. "I always knew about partition," she said, "but I didn't know about the absolute terror." She suddenly learned about the tens of millions of people suddenly forced to pick a side, to abandon their homes and friends, then travel east or west through violent mobs that could rape or slaughter them for their faith or their accent. Some were lucky enough to find a home; many others spent years in refugee camps. It was a history that she'd never seen before, and that she realized most Americans had never known, "especially if your education was done in Texas, where all of mine was. … I feel like when I was in school the only thing that was touched upon was Gandhi."
But this wasn't about educational failures. Aziz said she realized that she was part of a generation whose parents and grandparents went through partition but never talked about it. That's something she sees as especially common in Asian cultures, to just not discuss traumatic events. She pointed to Lulu Wang's semi-autobiographical film The Farewell. "Their grandmother's sick and everyone's like, 'No one tell her.'" But nondisruptive silence wasn't going to work for her. After visiting the exhibition, she said, "we go to the food court for lunch, and we're eating KFC, and I'm waving a chicken strip going, 'What is this? Tell me about it?'"
However, the questioning was not accusatory. She called the process, and the podcast it would become, "atonement, in a way. I never really looked into my culture in my adolescence, and my grandparents on my dad's side lived with us in Texas for a few years. I didn't know about partition, but I didn't ask them what their lives were like." She quickly realized that, seven decades after partition, the window to talk to people who lived through it was closing. "My grandfather was 14 [then], he's 89 now and his memory isn't great. My grandma lived through partition and she then also lived through the 1971 Liberation War in Bangladesh. … She doesn't want to talk to me about those things, and she may not remember them now."
That life-changing mall trip left Aziz questioning the underpinnings of the identity that she had taken for granted, and the connections to her heritage. She said, "I was born in Pakistan, and my parents were born there, but all of my grandparents and all of my other relatives and ancestors were born in India." Yet with the constant simmering border conflicts between the two nations, because she is from Pakistan, "I won't get to go to see my grandparents' house." Equally, while she'd grown up aware of "this innate Indians versus Pakistanis thing" that has colored global politics for the last 75 years, and even though India is seeing a resurgence of Hindu nationalism that makes it even less likely she will be able to visit, "our food and language and general sense are cut from the same cloth."
It was a story that continued to fascinate Aziz, even if she wasn't quite sure how to tell it. At a loose end during the pandemic, she pitched the project to I Heart Media through their NextUp Initiative for underrepresented voices and was accepted into it "right before my 31st birthday." She called the program "a little bit of a bootcamp, a six-month fellowship [where] they would teach you the ropes of podcasting. And what's great is that it was paid, so I was paid to do the research."
But that research was brutal and born of often horrible personal experiences from survivors, many of them in their 70s, 80s, even 90s. Like the former Rutgers economics lecturer tearing up as he talked for 2½ hours about losing family, or the Stanford professor who can't smell barbecue without being reminded of the smoke from burning bodies. And there were the stories from her own family, from her own grandfather, with whom she finally talked about it: about his nearly 700-mile sea voyage from his home in Bombay (now Mumbai) to a new life in Karachi, about how his sister was born on the day of partition – August 15, 1947. "So there's all this stuff happening, and there's a kid being born."
Another realization: If that great-aunt had been born a month earlier, she would have been Indian. "My grandparents were teenagers when this happened. What if they decided to stay, or leave and attempt to come back – which many people thought they could, but didn't. What if they wanted to convert? Your life can change with a handful of decisions, but I feel like, for this, it's really, really true."
Partition debuts on I Heart Media Aug. 15.
Invasion, Empire, and Division: A Brief History of the Creation of India and Pakistan
1526 Babur, Amir of Ferghana, defeats Ibrahim Lodi, Sultan of Delhi, at the first Battle of Panipat, and establishes the Mughal Empire. By 1700, his descendants have expanded the empire to control most of South Asia.
1600 The British East India Company is founded in London. Nominally a mercantile shipping firm, granted a royal monopoly on all trade with South Asia, it is little more than a front for British imperial ambitions and becomes a militaristic invading force for the next 200 years.
1757 After defeating the army of the Nawab of Bengal at the Battle of Plessey, the British East India Company becomes the de facto government of India, either through military force or agreements with the over 500 principalities in the region.
1857 The Great Rebellion: A broad alliance of Indian forces ally against Company rule but are viciously suppressed. Mughal Emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar is dethroned and exiled, ending the Mughal Empire.
1858 The British Parliament passes the Government of India Act 1858, placing the nation under direct control of the British monarchy.
1866 Muslim philosopher and political theorist Syed Ahmad Khan proposes the two-nation theory, that Indian Muslims and Hindus are too culturally divided to coexist if the occupying British forces ever withdraw.
1874 The East India Company is dissolved.
1876 Queen Victoria is declared Empress of India.
1919 In the wake of World War I, Parliament passes the Government of India Act 1919, expanding Indian control of its own government in limited areas.
1937 Parliament passes the Government of India Act 1935, establishing Burma (now Myanmar) and Aden (southern Yemen) as separate colonies.
1947 Worn down by World War II, with British public sentiment turning against the idea of empire and calls from some Indian leaders to adopt the two-nation theory, Parliament passes the Indian Independence Act, ending British rule and creating two states: the Muslim Dominion of Pakistan and the Hindu Union of India (the latter also intended to be a homeland for the region's Sikhs). The act receives royal assent on July 18 and takes effect August 15. With only days of warning, millions of people are forced to flee for fear of their lives, and the arbitrary borders are so contentious that within a year, India and Pakistan are at war over Kashmir, a conflict that simmers to this day.
1971 Bengali nationalists in East Pakistan launch the Liberation War after police fire on protesters calling for recognition of Bengali as an official language. The region achieves independence and become Bangladesh.
