281. Partition: Why Was India Split In Two? (Part 4)

17:01Anita:And chunks and pitches and patches of Punjab as well, which is one of the most prosperous states. And so he announces that British India will be divided into two dominions and that all the princely states will then be able to choose which dominion they join. And ultimately, there's so much violence at this point that after about 20 different suggestions for how independence might happen, everyone finally wearily accepts. And there's this photograph of Nehru looking horrified with himself, but putting up his hand, finally agreeing to partition. And he later says, we were tired men and we were getting on in our years.

17:38The plan for partition offed a way out and we took it.

17:41Anita:So amidst all this maelstrom, uncertainty, violence, on the 14th and the 15th of August, both Pakistan and India raise their flags and they declare themselves free of British rule. It's meant to be the dawn of a brand new era of independence. And these are some of the words that were spoken.

18:01William:Long years ago, we made a tryst with destiny. And now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge, not wholly or in full measure, but very substantially at the stroke of the midnight hour when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom. Those are the words spoken by Nehru as the Indian flag went up.

18:26Anita:And Sam, just the significance of this. I mean, so Mountbatten announces three days after the partition announcement, he says, I'm going to move forward the date for partition from the end of 1948 to just 77 days from now. And I think there's all sorts of stuff that's heaped on Mountbatten accusations that this was all a kind of great conspiracy that I don't quite buy. But the thing that you can clearly pin on him in terms of the damage that he caused during partition is rushing it, making it go from when in the earlier episodes we talked about the separation of Burma and the separation of the Arabian states.

19:03These were partitions that were meticulously planned over six years, five and six years. whereas in the case of 1947 he says that you've got 77 days.

19:13William:Sam, many people say that the reason for this speed was not that things were going to spin out of control but that Mountbatten wanted to get back to England to get some plum job in the Admiralty. Do you believe that theory? No, to be honest. I think that there are many reasons that he speeds things up and there's all sorts of things on his mind. Far more in his letters is the fact that, as I said, he doesn't have access to the intelligence services, and he's worried that Britain's going to be blamed for a bloodbath over which he has no control. And I think he's worried about Britain's reputation and trying to just get Britain out so he can place the blame on someone else.

19:53And crucially, no one has any idea where Pakistan will be. There's a map that's published just a month before independence, where every state as a map of each of the provinces of India and then lines to each of the provinces saying, this might become part of Pakistan. We don't know. Potentially Punjab will be part of Pakistan. Potentially Delhi will be part of Pakistan. Do we know if Hyderabad is going to be part of Pakistan? Who knows if Kolkata will be the capital of Pakistan?

20:21Anita:Yeah, and these lines are so incendiary because quite apart from putting the jewels in the crown up for auction, things like who gets Delhi, who gets Kolkata, They are lines that draw from a river to a dam, you know, in between a village. Or, you know, they are so sort of haphazardly drawn through a populace of people who have lived together. And they are impractical. And they're also, I mean, eventually it becomes the gift of a man of whom it's famously said never went east of Paris. I mean, I think I'm saying that. Right, Radcliffe, Cyril Radcliffe. This sort of, you know, quintessentially sort of pink-kneed, pink-foreheaded bureaucrat who doesn't know India, who really hasn't, and he has to sweat it out miserably in heat, trying to sort out in record time the future of millions of people.

21:07Yeah. And bizarrely, this was considered a plus point for him. It's Jinnah actually who suggests getting Radcliffe to divide the land because of the fact that he doesn't know India, so he'll be an unbiased arbitrator. And this is, I think, the key thing to remember is that you've got committees proliferating, staffed by equal numbers of Muslim and non-Muslim bureaucrats. And the exercise that they're being asked to do is kind of, it's enormous. They're dividing everything from rivers to stationary sets. And so it's not just land that's being divided. Some bureaucrats get asked to consider whether to partition the kennel club, which, you know, about beetles.

21:42The Encyclopedia Britannica is divided up so that A to K volumes go to India and L to Z goes to Pakistan.

21:50William:And antiquities, you say, there's some terrible gnarling of... The Mahenjo-Daro necklace, which was one of the great finds from the Indus Valley civilization, this beautiful gold thread with lapis lazuli and opals and topaz, etc., which was from 4 ,500 BC. Who knows which country is going to get it? So they decide to snip the golden thread and give equal number of beads to India and equal number of beads to Pakistan. So even history is going to be divided. It's just such a powerful symbol that a thing of beauty is kind of mutilated in order to satisfy this rush of division without taking stock.

22:30Anita:This is also sort of tragic, apart from sort of the wrecking of heirlooms that goes on. Let's talk about the human cost of this, because his speed to avoid having blood on his hands is what precipitates the greatest amount of bloodshed. So you have people now who are reading in the papers every day of where the dividing line might be. It might go through their villages, their towns, their families, their mothers, their fathers might be on the wrong side of the line. And this massive migration begins, which is very poorly policed. Policing may not be the right word because it's not polices, it's soldiers who are meant to keep the peace between these long lines of people.

23:08Anita:Let's just talk about the scale of this. We've covered partition before, but still, I think it's worth mentioning the greatest exodus of humanity the world has ever known. So just talk a little bit about how that works, and then we'll take a break and come back. Sure. So by the end of the year, the number of people being rehabilitated by the Ministry of Rehabilitation is close to 20 million, which is more than the contemporary populations of Ireland, Greece, Iraq and Afghanistan combined. Enormous numbers of people displaced, not necessarily just over the border, but just people displaced from their homes.

23:47And partly this is to do with religious violence spreading. But I think people tend to have this image of a lot of the violence being neighbours turning on each other, which is true. there's a guy who was interviewed by Urvashi Battalya, this Sikh man called Harjit, who says, I cannot explain it, but one day our entire village took off to a nearby Muslim village on a killing spree. We simply went mad and it has cost me 50 years of remorse, of sleepless nights. I cannot forget the faces of those we killed. So there's all sorts of people like that. But also, I think far more important and far more visible in the archives and in people's testimonies are all of these paramilitary groups.

24:24So during the 30s and 40s, you had groups like the Muslim League National Guards, which were basically kind of trained to protect Muslims from Hindu mobs. And you have groups like the RSS, which continues to play a large role in India today, that trains Hindus to protect themselves, teaches them how to use latis, teaches them regimental kind of marches, etc. But very often, it's paramilitary groups who hear that Hindus or Muslims are in trouble a few villages over and then go on a killing spree.

24:56Anita:And can I just also point out just from personal history, a lot of people are given the heads up by their neighbours who are of a different religion. So I know certainly in my family, it's the case, one wing of my family was saved because Muslim neighbours came and said, you know what, you're on the list, you're next on a list, you need to get out of here. and so sort of hide them and take them as far as they can so that they can escape and you have countless stories I mean anybody I know who is the same color as me and it's from particularly from Punjab which is one of the most riven states during this partition has a story like that so you did have you know you did have neighbors certainly getting swept up in the violence and turning on each other but you equally had people who said you know what you're my brother I don't understand I don't understand what's happening and you need to get your kids out both those things can be true The other thing that I'd emphasize here is Punjab saw the most violence.

25:47And so I think it's highlighted the most. So Punjab was where most of the army came from. And so a lot of the people who were involved in the violence had just been trained in arms during World War II, had been on the front lines, and so knew how to use weapons and had often weapons privately at home. And so the violence there was far worse. But I think that the migration is visible in every corner of the subcontinent. And I think it's to a degree that is often not fully understood. One of the areas that sees the biggest demographic change is the Indian state of Tripura and northeast India, which is majority tribal communities that is suddenly overwhelmed with refugees.

26:25You have people in South India, en masse Muslims from Tamil Nadu and Hyderabad, migrating to places like Karachi. You have half of the population of Bombay empties and heads off to Karachi, heads off to Pakistan. And I think that we underestimate the fact that this is from all across the subcontinent. And I remember finding it bizarre that you can go to towns like Almora in the Himalayas today, in Uttarakhand, and find a whole bazaar of Muslim Havelis that were abandoned at partition. You can go to Hyderabad and see all these old stately homes that had been abandoned overnight. There's all sorts of reasons for why people move.

27:03There's obviously people fleeing their homes. Some people have a millenarian desire for a religious homeland across the border. Many Dalits, untouchables, migrate because it offers a liberating change of status. And crucially, many Muslims, such as the grandfather of Bollywood star Shahrukh Khan, actually migrate away from Pakistan to India out of the desire to live in a secular state. And so you have all sorts of reasons. It's not as simple as everyone fleeing their home, escaping. There's a million different migrations going on at once, in a sense.

27:37William:Sam, but to return to the Punjab and just to look a bit more closely at what you just said about the armed nature of much of the population there, it isn't just that they have army training and it isn't just that they have access to weapons. You actually see them being sort of drilled and organized into military units and you have organized attacks by armed men who are drilled and knowledgeable about how to take an enemy position, attacking villages of unarmed people. Exactly. And I think there was one interview that I was doing in a town called Dujana in what's now Haryana, the state that borders Delhi.

28:15And we were basically told, you know, they often describe partition as medieval in Dujana town. It literally was a siege. And all the Muslims gathered within the old walled city and began firing medieval cannons out at well-regimented Hindu and Sikh militias that had gathered in military formation outside of the walls. It wasn't random violence, is what I want to emphasize again.

28:40William:I once did a similar story of a village under siege, the other side of the border, on the Pakistani side. And two old men who now live near me in Delhi were sweet makers. And they defended their village because there was only one entrance to the village. It was in an old walled fortress. And they defended the village by having their big degs of hot fat, which they flied their jalebes in, and they would pour this hot fat, boiling fat onto anyone that tried to come into the village until they got rescued.

29:12Anita:I mean, that's proper medieval, that is. Well, look, we're going to take a break now, but I just want to point one thing out going to the break. All of these people who are fleeing their homes and homes that have been theirs and their families for generations. There is this maelstrom of violence and yet nobody knows where the partition line will be. This episode is brought to you by Facebook. So you were scrolling on Marketplace and there it was, the bike you'd been searching for. You sent a message and it turned out the seller was super chatty, kind of funny, and an avid cyclist. The next thing you know, you're in a cycling crew.

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30:41Anita:Welcome back. So just before the break, Sam, we were talking about the fact that, you know, there was just unprecedented out of control violence. Mountbatten in a hurry because he wanted to avoid unprecedented violence. I mean, the whole thing is sort of a vicious circle. And yet nobody knew where the line was drawn. And they only find out two days after independence. That's right, isn't it? Literally for the first two days, there's particularly a diary by a man called Fikr Tonsfi, who's a Hindu with a Muslim sounding name, who lived in what's now Lahore, in what's now Pakistan. He's one of the great satirists of the time, but he writes a diary that's been published recently.

31:19It's rather amazing because he literally writes, on the day of independence, everyone's waving flags, but no one's quite sure which flag to wave. It's only two days later that he writes about huddling around a radio with his friend Mumtaz, who's a Muslim, to listen to the broadcast of the Radcliffe line. It's all over radio. It's not like watching the news where you've got a kind of visual map, it's over the radio and they're trying to figure out where this line will be. And they've got a map in front of them and a pen. And as they say, this city has fallen to this, this city, they try to figure out where the border might be.

31:53And even then it's still a bit unclear. They have to wait for newspapers to come out a few days later that often don't arrive because of the partition violence. And so everyone eventually hears that Lahore is part of Pakistan and they look outside and see crescent flags of freedom waving down the street is what he writes. But then he writes the next morning, he wakes up and walks down the street and about a third of the houses down his street have massive padlocks placed over the doors as the Hindu and Sikh families have begun leaving because they've realised that it might no longer be safe for him.

32:25He writes how his friend suddenly begins crying when he learns that his hometown, Batala, Mumtaz's hometown, it has ended up in India and will be in a different country. And meanwhile, Fikhrat Hounsvi is wondering how Nankan Asayib, the birthplace of Sikhism, has ended up in Pakistan and will be separated from Sikhs. This is a story that's all across the country, sacred sites falling on the wrong side of the border. You often get entire areas being traded off. So for example, India really needed a road into the mountains, or it might need access to certain rivers in order to make it a sustainable country.

33:07And so I think Chittagong Hill Tracts, for example, which is Buddhist majority, is given to Pakistan, despite 2 % of its population being Muslim. And this is one of the things. Radcliffe's border leaves 42 % of Bengal's non-Muslims in Pakistan, which ensures, in a sense, that the political fiasco that prompted partition, the inability to overcome communal politics is set to continue on. This line does not resolve this problem.

33:35William:And do you think this is because Radcliffe is ignorant that he doesn't understand the importance of a great sacred site, like one of the great Sikh shrines in the Punjab, going to one country or the other? Or is it just it's a rush job or it's just inherent in the idea of partition? Well, I think it's inherent in the idea of partition. The crucial thing is that South Asia did not have Muslim districts and Hindu districts. In every district, there was a mixed population. And so there was no border that could have satisfied everyone. And I think we forget what a lot of the cities looked like. Karachi was Hindu majority, whilst Delhi was essentially a Muslim city.

34:12Kolkata was assumed by Jinnah to potentially be the future capital of Pakistan because it was the capital of the largest Muslim majority province, Bengal.

34:24William:And was it itself Muslim majority? It was, wasn't it? No, it was Hindu majority, but in a Muslim majority province.

34:29Anita:Right. So, look, one of the things that is often hotly debated, even now, is whether Jinnah wanted a secular state for new Pakistan. And therefore, it shouldn't have mattered so much if Buddhists find themselves in a secular Pakistan. You know, what's the difference if you're in India or you're in Pakistan? I mean, what is the evidence of what he wanted and what he got being different? So Jinnah is a difficult person to write about because he says he's always preaching to the choir. So he says different things depending on who he's speaking to. And he'll speak to some Muslim lobby and say, you know, we will create the new Medina.

35:08But then in a speech to Karachi's minorities, he has a very particular speech, which is you are free to go to your temples. you are free to go to your mosques or to any other place of worship in Pakistan. You may belong to any religion or caste or creed. That has nothing to do with the business of the state. And I personally feel that that is kind of the Pakistan that he'd envisaged. He basically wanted a line that allowed Muslims in one part more political precedents and Hindus in other parts.

35:36Anita:But he doesn't even manage to convince his daughter, it turns out, because Dina, Jina's daughter, says, Actually, I'm not coming to Pakistan. Yes. And this lovely letter that she writes, my darling Papa, first of all, I must congratulate you. You got Pakistan. How hard you've worked for it. I do hope you're keeping well. I get lots of news from you from the local newspapers in Bombay. Are you coming back here? That's a little girl asking her daddy, are you coming back here? Take care of yourself, Papa. She's not little, but just the voice of it. She's married. She's a grown woman. But the little girl voice comes out.

36:10William:And is that why she hasn't gone to Pakistan? because she's married to the Wadiahs. Yeah, so again, Jina had married a Parisi and so does his daughter. Dina marries the Parisi Wadiah family in Bombay and never moves. And there's this extraordinary, I think it's Mountbatten's press secretary, writes how on Independence Day, Jina is strangely absent mentally from the occasion. He's not celebrating and he's looking rather sad. And he wonders whether it's to do with his daughter. He's got no family with him. Yeah, he's got a sister, that's all. But not his daughter.

36:41Anita:I think he doesn't see her again after partition. He doesn't. He never sees her again. They never see each other again. But he keeps his house in Bombay. He thinks he's going to be able to cross over. No one saw it going as badly as it did. It doesn't get much worse than what becomes the creation of East and West Pakistan. And again, we have to focus on Punjab for this. So tell us a little bit about how we end up with a new nation state that is divided by hundreds of miles of another nation state. So there were Muslim majorities in the east and the west, and Pakistan is carved out of the Muslim majority regions of the subcontinent.

37:19And so you end up with, you know, basically the area that's modern-day Bangladesh in the east and the area of modern-day Pakistan in the west. And they are one country in 1947.

37:28William:But no connection between them? No, well, they've got boats and planes. And that, you know, boats were the main way of getting around in the 40s, we forget. And there are all sorts of countries that have similar... But it's a long chug in a tug to go Karachi to Dhaka. We forget how much that was the main way of getting around back then. And the fact that several other countries have made that work. You know, Malaysia is made up of the Malay Peninsula plus a bit of Borneo, for example. But I think that there is definitely something different about the way that the refugee crisis works in East and West.

38:02In the East, most of the minorities don't leave. And so the area that later becomes Bangladesh has most of its Hindus remain. Whereas in Punjab, there is so much violence that eventually they are forced, India and Pakistan are forced to agree to a wholesale exchange of the population. So all Hindus and Sikhs have to leave the Pakistani side of Punjab and all Muslims have to leave the Indian side. And crucially, I think it's the first Pakistani Prime Minister, Liakathili Khan, who literally writes, Pakistan is so overwhelmed with refugees now that it does not want Muslims from regions other than East Punjab to leave their homeland and come to Pakistan.

38:46The partition of the country was done on the principle that minorities will remain in their regions. And this is a dramatic volt fast for the leader of a self-proclaimed homeland for Indian Muslims. But times are desperate and literally half of the Pakistani government are operating out of shipping crates.

39:02Anita:Literally, literally out of shipping crates. Literally. There is a deep sense amongst a lot of Pakistanis that Pakistan was not given any of the major cities of the Raj. It's not given Delhi and it's not given Kolkata, both of which it was kind of assumed it would be given. It's given Lahore and Karachi, but East Bengal, later Bangladesh, isn't even given the capital of Bengal. It's stranded in the East with Dhaka, which is a nice historic city, but it's not got all the bureaucratic buildings needed to run a country. But I think, yeah.

40:10William:desks but no chairs. In the division, Pakistanis felt that it was deliberately designed to make the state a failure at birth.

40:19Anita:How much truth to that, Sam? Because that is fascinating. I think it's a mix. I think that, for example, certain members of Congress, when they take over the Indian state, start arguing that they should refuse to send over money to Pakistan and equipment to Pakistan. Now that they've inherited this thing, they shouldn't send money to their enemy, who's, you know, these separatists who've taken half of our country, is how a lot of, and so particularly Siddharth Patel, the home minister who was running the intelligence services and stopping Mountbatten from having access.

40:53William:Hero of the current government who've just erected the largest statue in South Asia to this man. Not the largest statue in South Asia, the largest statue in the world that's about four times the size of the Statue of Liberty. And he very much argues that why are we offering to send all this money in our bank vaults to Pakistan if Hindus and Sikhs are being massacred there? And shouldn't we use this as leverage over the Pakistani government? And one of the reasons that the man who assassinates Gandhi, Ghotse, does so is because he sees Gandhi protesting this. He sees Gandhi basically doing a fast to try and convince Sadar Patel to hand over...

41:34William:The right foot boots. and money that was meant to be sent to Pakistan. And Gandhi's saying we need to be fair and we need to send this stuff over because it's only then that we will be able to have peace with our new neighbour.

41:44Anita:Have peace. If you've got a comfortable neighbour, you have peace. Now, can I just make one little observation about Sadar Patel? So, I mean, most people, I guess, who are interested in this part of history and this part of the world may have seen Attenborough's Gandhi. And Sadar Patel in Attenborough's Gandhi, who's this great figure for Hindu nationalism, even today, and is sort of, you know, the wily dealmaker who will go on to, you know, and we'll talk about this in the next episode, tell princely states to sign over to India and is the muscle behind this, was played by a Muslim, Syed Jaffrey.

42:16Anita:And played, you know, just first of all, let that hang in the air. I didn't know that. Played brilliantly by Syed Jaffrey, who was a Muslim. And Syed Jaffrey, I have a little knowledge of this because there used to be a reunion of Hill Station schools. The people, whether they're Brits or, you know, white British or brown British, they would come together for all those hill stations in the British Raj where they went to school. And Saeed Jaffrey was one such. And he went to an entirely mixed school where like lots of his sort of fellow students who are all these good old boys, Jennifer, his wife was there and was utterly delightful introducing me to people.

42:49Anita:And they were talking about how naughty Saeed Jaffrey was sneaking out of the school so he could go to the bazaars and bring them all sweets and things like that. And so he's the one who plays Saudara Patel and he is a Muslim. And that would not happen today, I don't think, I would suggest. But there you are. That was just a little dogleg because we like those on here. So Gandhi is arguing, look, you have to have a comfortable neighbour or we'll never have peace. And how unpopular, I know with God's say, and the extreme wing of what we would call Hindutva hates it, what he's saying, and hates everything he stands for, and hates the idea he thinks there's going to be a porous border and people are going to be able to go back and forth and thinks he gives too much to Jinnah.

43:33Anita:But how much is that the prevailing mood in India? Or is it just a minority who think this? I think no one knows what's going to happen. And so you get all sorts of regions where there's absolute mass migration, for example. But then you've got a huge number of people who do stay put. Today, I think Sindh in southern Pakistan remains 10 % Hindu, just like a lot of North Indian provinces remain 10 % Muslim. I think present-day Bangladesh has an even higher percentage of Hindus and Sikhs, and later suffers under Pakistani rule as a result of that. The Pakistani government perceives East Pakistan as too Hindu.

44:09But no one knows what a future relationship looks like. As we'll discuss in the next episode, within a few months, they go to war over the princely state of Kashmir. And this is a war that creates the conflict that we've seen play out just recently. you know, the India-Pakistan hostility. But I think at the time, there is very much a wing that says we will never be able to have a good relationship with these people on both sides of the border. And then there's a huge number of people saying, if our bureaucrats can work together, if our armies can work together, then we can create peace. You know, once this migration finishes, once we restore the peace, now that we have inherited these governments, India and Pakistan, from the government of the Raj, well, now that we've inherited the military might of the Raj and the bureaucracy of the Raj, potentially we can create a South Asia of more porous borders.

45:05And I think if you look at Nehru's comments just a few weeks after independence, he does talk about potentially a united nations of South Asia emerging in the not-too-distant future. And likewise, Jinnah does not sell his house in Bombay and his daughter remains there. So I think amongst the high up leadership, there is a sense that this too shall pass and eventually India and Pakistan will be able to move beyond this. Obviously, that's not the case.

45:36Anita:Can I ask you about one project that is very close to your heart? And I just think it's such an extraordinary, wonderful thing that you have been doing with your friend, Project Dasan, because you've been trying to reconnect survivors of partition, the displaced whose lives changed utterly on one day in August. What kind of things have you been doing? And just explain what Darstan is. Sure. So this began about seven years ago when I was in Oxford with an Indian friend and a Pakistani friend. And we realized that, you know, unfortunately, thanks to the enduring hostilities between India and Pakistan that emerged from partition, There is still no tourism agreement.

46:17And so the millions, tens of millions of people displaced can still never go and see their homes. Families can never see where they're actually from. But meeting in Britain, there's this absurd sense that A, it's absurd that you have to meet in the coloniser's country in order to meet someone from across the border. But B, actually, a lot of these homelands are really easy for people on the other side to access. They're not lost. People can go and visit them. And so, you know, Sparsh could probably never get to visit his ancestral home, my friend, but our friend Sadia could easily drive there in an hour and find his old ancestral home and take photos of the school that his granddad had been to, the mosque.

46:56And so what we were doing was using virtual reality. We created teams in India and Pakistan and used virtual reality to scan the old houses, the old mosques, the old temples, the old gurudwaras that people had left behind 75 years ago, and allow them essentially to virtually travel back across the border to where they came from. So we were doing that for the 75th anniversary of partition in 2022. And the aim was to do this for 75 families before the 75th anniversary. In the event, COVID slightly stumped that, but we managed to do it for about 30, 40 families.

47:30William:Sam, maybe just to conclude, you could tell that story about Sparsh, who you mentioned, your friend. You both went to Sparsh's village in the frontier. Tell us that story. So Sparsh was my co-founder, along with our friends Sadia and Amina. And Sparsh had assumed that he would never be able to cross over into Pakistan because of the way that these things are. But eventually he applied for a visa and got it. And particularly this was after having worked with the museums in Lahore, etc. on Project Dostan. And so we managed to get references from across the border and they helped him get a visa. And so we travelled together to his ancestral home and it was down this kind of bumpy track on the border of Punjab and the Northwest Frontier.

48:08So you could see the hills of the Northwest Frontier in the distance. And we're getting closer and closer and closer. It was the kind of last village before the frontier, essentially. And we went, Sparsh had heard the story of his grandfather had been saved by the Muslim family. They heard, as you said, Anita, they heard that a mob was coming to get them. And this man called Shere Khan had kept them in the back of their house and looked after them and said, I won't let anyone touch you. And eventually managed to smuggle them across the border into India. And anyway, so we arrived in this village with Sparsh dressed in the outfit that his grandfather told him that he used to wear.

48:44And of course, they were actually arriving in the village in the 1930s outfit. It was a bit like arriving in London, dressed in a top hat, a bowler hat and a walking stick. So everyone was completely befuddled what this white guy and his Hindu friend, dressed as a 1930s dandy, was doing in the village. And Sparsh said, you know, I'm here to track down this family and try to find my old house. And it turned out that the person that we were speaking to was Shere Khan's son. And he took us to the old house that Sparsh's family had lived in for generations, showed which fields had belonged to Sparsh's family for generations, and then took us in for tea right until Sparsh's grandfather passed away.

49:24His grandfather and Shere Khan's son had a WhatsApp group together, the kind of bailer reunion. And it was deeply emotional. Sparsh picked up some pebbles from the village, which he made into jewelry, family heirlooms for his family going down the generations. Because he was always saying, you know, my family doesn't have archives, etc. We lost everything in partition. And there's nothing that we have from Bela to show where we came from. But so he wanted to pick up something from Bela and make it into heirlooms for the next generations, you know, three, four generations from now, they'll still have a piece of Bela with them, even if, you know, the relationship between India and Pakistan worsens again.

50:02And even if his kids can never visit Bela, they'll always have a piece of Bela with them.

50:06Anita:I have to say, and we're going to have to draw this to a close, and we are going to carry on with this, of course, in this series. And if you can't wait for the next one, join the club, empirepoduk.com, empirepoduk.com, and you get this all in one go, if that's how you like listening and you like binging us. And who could blame you for that? But just a final observation before we leave you. This connection with earth, dharti, you know, they call it dharti in India, and zameen is the Urdu word for exactly the same thing. But it is much more than just the earth. It is who you are, where you have grown from, where your forebears have grown from.

50:42Anita:And the number of people I know who have been lucky enough to travel across the border, and I count myself as one, who find it impossible to leave without a scoop of earth. And I have one too. You know, in Lahore, picked up a handful of earth and brought it back with me because I thought, you know, this is the stuff my grandfather used to walk on. So yeah, just the emotional level of this still resonates today. Anyway, look, what's next on the agenda then, William?

51:09William:So we have got the princes. And as Sam said, is it a third of India? How much of India is under the princely states? A third of India was in the princely states. And if you look at the maps of India and Pakistan on Independence Day, they're missing the entirety of Rajasthan, the entirety of Gujarat, half of modern-day Pakistan, a third of modern-day India is not part of India and Pakistan on Independence Day. This is the bit of the story that isn't often told. How much of the line of the border was not actually drawn by this unfortunate Cyril Radcliffe who had seven weeks to divide an entire subcontinent, but was actually divided by the princes who had three options.

51:50William:They could go with India, they could go with Pakistan, or they could choose independence. That was the idea. So that's a story that is less well-known. I think many of you will have heard versions of the story we've told in this episode before, but I think the next episode will be a complete surprise to many. So it's goodbye from me, William de Rumpel.

52:08Anita:And goodbye from me, Anita Arnand.