OP-ED: Partition 1947: A season of remembering

When the sharp dagger of communalism sliced away at the country

Remembrance of a traumatic phase in the history of the South Asian sub-continent assails us again. It is the painful memory of the cataclysm which overtook the land in August 1947 and which have gone on, in ghostly manner, inhabiting our collective imagination that we confront all these decades after the disaster. As many as 2,000,000 people -- Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs -- perished as the sharp dagger of religious communalism sliced away at the country. 14 million people bade goodbye to their ancestral homes and made their way to territories they had never known.

The partition of India remains a gnawing pain in the collective memory, of generations born after 1947 and indeed long after 1947. In Pakistan, you come across families who recall with fondness the homes they left behind in Lucknow and Delhi. In India, men like Khushwant Singh, IK Gujral, and Kuldip Nayar were constant reminders of the uprooted lives they lived once they were forced to leave the western half of the carved-up Punjab and make their way east.