Today's voicemail is taken a snippet of a poem titled Learning Urdu from Agha Shahid Ali, a Kashmiri-American poet.

The partition of British India in 1947 brought about a scale of violence and bloodshed which followed the pattern of the traumatic years following 1945. In this episode, I break down Chatterji's article, in which she has analysed how the partition came about, specifically looking at the Bengal Boundary Commission. 

Contrary to previous episodes where I've looked at the experiences of ordinary people, this one focusses more on the 'higher politics', the competing intentions of political groups, and how they contributed, significantly, to the ensuing violence in August 1947. I do spend some time discussing the effects of these decisions on every-day life in Bengal.

Books/articles mentioned:

The Fashioning of a Frontier: The Radcliffe Line and Bengal's Border Landscape, 1947-52, Joya Chatterji

Partitions: A Transnational History of Twentieth-Century Territorial Separatism, Arie Dubnov and Laura Robson

Cover art - taken from Wikipedia.