India Families reunite 75 years on from partition

The Muslim political leader Muhammad Ali Jinnah, however, argued for a separate state for Muslims, fearful of the implications of a Hindu-majority India.

- Hannah Ellis-Petersen and Aakash Hassan

It was an embrace that held 74 years of pain and longing. As Sikka Khan, 75, fell into the arms of his older brother Sadiq Khan, now in his 80s, the pair wept with sorrow and joy. More than seven decades had passed since the brothers, torn apart by the horrors of partition, had seen each other. With Sikka in India and Sadiq in Pakistan, neither knew if the other was alive. Yet both had never stopped looking.

But on a crisp January afternoon this year, the pair were reunited along the border that had so devastatingly fractured their family. “Finally, we are together,” Sadiq told his brother, tears streaming down his face.

It was 75 years ago, on 15 August 1947, that the subcontinent was divided down religious lines to become two independent countries, India and Pakistan. It was to be a bloody and bitter partition. After 300 years of official British presence, the key figures of Indian independence, Mahatma Gandhi and his protege and future prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru, envisaged a single, secular country.

 

The Muslim political leader Muhammad Ali Jinnah, however, argued for a separate state for Muslims, fearful of the implications of a Hindu-majority India.

As religious tensions were stoked, deadly riots broke out. The British, keen to extricate themselves from India, oversaw the drawing of a crude border that ruptured the Indian states of Punjab to the west and Bengal to the east, to form a disjointed Pakistan that angered all communities.