Partition Of Subcontinent 1947 Quotes

“Hindustan had become free. Pakistan had become independent soon after its inception but man was still slave in both these countries -- slave of prejudice … slave of religious fanaticism … slave of barbarity and inhumanity.”
― Saadat Hasan Manto

“Blood stains are not easy to remove. Yes, and they will enter the rooms and see my bedding. Perhaps a young girl will fit into my daughter’s clothes. Or it’ll all be a waste because they too lost a young daughter in the vadda raula. These clothes will haunt them. They will want to go back. How crazy! I don’t want to be here and they don’t want to be there. They can’t be here and I can’t be there. How absurd! It is like someone just did it in jest. What value does my life have? Zilch. Nobody thought of this? They live with my nightmares, I live with theirs. And then learn to ignore these sounds I hear from the crevices of the new house. Each night I plug my ears and shut my eyes. A new story over my story. The slate has been wiped clean. With blood.”
― Sakoon Singh, In The Land of The Lovers

“For Jinnah, Partition was a constitutional way out of a political stalemate, as he saw it, and not the beginning of a permanent state of hostility between two countries or two nations. This explains his expectation that India and Pakistan would live side by side ‘like the United States and Canada’, obviously with open borders, free flow of ideas and free trade. It is also the reason why Pakistan’s Quaid-i-Azam insisted that his Malabar Hill house in Bombay be kept as it was so that he could return to the city where he lived most of his life after retiring as Governor-General of Pakistan.”
― Husain Haqqani, Reimagining Pakistan: Transforming a Dysfunctional Nuclear State

“Partition severed economic and social links, destroying the political, ecological, and demographic balance it had taken the subcontinent hundreds of years to forge. Yet India with far greater social diversities was able to recover from the shock of partition to lay the foundations of a constitutional democracy. With a legacy of many of the same structural and ideational features of the colonial state as its counterpart, Pakistan was unable to build viable institutions that could sustain the elementary processes of a participatory democracy.”
― Ayesha Jalal, The Struggle for Pakistan: A Muslim Homeland and Global Politics

“PARTITION'

are your drains clean of blood now?
do you recall the names, and faces
of your own people?

did your countrymen get to die
right like human beings?

butchered sisters and mothers
still wait by the windows,
with no lantern.

that was no proper farewell
past midnight.
minarets whisper your ghazals
to an empty sky,
Koklass’ know the borders too.

what have you done, sir?”
― Abhijit Sarmah, Dying With A Little Patience: Poems

“She felt exhausted: her energy first spent wanting so sorely to return and then accepting the loss as final. As her old life in Okara was fast becoming just a story to be told, she too was becoming irrelevant, like an out-of-use currency, or an old train route, defunct. Her body became slightly bent over and the folds of her skin began to hang loose, like they had lost interest in life. And all like a misunderstanding, like someone your own, someone very close, had tricked you, surreptitiously moved the very roof from over your head.”
― Sakoon Singh, In The Land of The Lovers

“Pakistan’s political case in Kashmir was strong. Its ‘intervention’ and support to the Kashmiris was as much against international law as India’s intervention in Hyderabad and Junagadh. Pakistan had already disputed the Boundary Commission’s demarcation of the border between India and Pakistan. By granting Gurdaspur, a Muslim majority district in Punjab, to India, Pakistan believed the Boundary Commission had provided India its only road link to Jammu. Pakistanis saw the handing over of Kashmir to India as something pre-planned by Mountbatten.”
― Nasim Zehra, From Kargil to the Coup: Events that Shook Pakistan

“Unlike the Punjabis and Bengalis, the Sindhis were not coming to an ‘Indian’ part of Sindh because Sindh was not divided into east and west Sindh. It went in its entirety to Pakistan.”
― Rita Kothari, Unbordered Memories : Sindhi Stories Of Partition