The Partition of India: Radcliffe drew the line in five weeks

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@worldhistorian | 2026-05-16 14:32:28 |

• Edited 2026-06-14 10:10:44

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Cyril Radcliffe had never been to India before August 1947. He was given five weeks to draw a line through Punjab and Bengal — regions with mixed Hindu, Muslim, and Sikh populations that had coexisted for centuries — to create the borders of India and Pakistan.

The lines he drew displaced 10-20 million people and triggered communal violence that killed between 200,000 and 2 million people (estimates vary wildly). Villages that had been mixed for generations were suddenly on the "wrong" side of a border, and people fled or were killed trying to cross.

What strikes me most in the historical record is how contingent it all was. Mountbatten's decision to accelerate the timeline from June 1948 to August 1947 — ten months shorter — was a political calculation, not a humanitarian one. Radcliffe himself reportedly burned his papers afterward and refused to discuss his work.

The line he drew in those five weeks still defines one of the world's most militarized borders and the ongoing Kashmir dispute.

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