Partition – Part Two – Dividing Lines

Origin Story

Podmasters

Society & Culture, News, News Commentary, History

4.8 • 655 Ratings

🗓️ 23 April 2025

⏱️ 74 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Welcome back to Origin Story, where we’re concluding the story of the partition of India and Pakistan. We resume in March 1947 with the arrival of the last viceroy of the Raj, Lord Mountbatten, and his formidable wife Edwina. They find a country on the precipice of civil war, with the Punjab consumed by ethnic violence between Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs. Nehru, Jinnah, Gandhi and the British haggle over the details of partition as the deadline draws near and tensions rise. After independence is declared on 15 August, the leaders struggle to bring peace to the new nations of India and Pakistan and avert all-out war over Kashmir. When did partition become truly inevitable? Was British incompetence to blame for the bloodshed? What, or who, brought an end to the violence? How does the legacy of partition continue to shape the subcontinent’s politics? And what can we learn about the dangers of identity-based politics today? • Support Origin Story on Patreon • Get the Origin Story books on Fascism, Centrism and Conspiracy Theory Reading list • John Bew, Citizen Clem: A Biography of Attlee (2016) • William Dalrymple, ‘The Great Divide’, The New Yorker (2015) • Patrick French, ‘The Brutal “Great Migration” That Followed India’s Independence and Partition’, Life.com (2016) • Sarvepalli Gopal, Jawaharlal Nehru: A Biography: Volume One: 1889-1947 (1975) • Sarvepalli Gopal, Jawaharlal Nehru: A Biography: Volume Two: 1947-1965 (1979) • Ramachandra Guha, Gandhi: The Years That Changed the World 1915-1948 (2018) • Gandhi, written by John Briley and directed by Richard Attenborough (1982) • Nisid Hajari, Midnight’s Furies: The Deadly Legacy of India’s Partition (2015) • Ayesha Jalal, The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim League and the Demand for Pakistan (1985) • George Orwell, ‘Reflections on Gandhi’, Partisan Review (1949) • Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children (1981) • Alex von Tunzelmann, Indian Summer: The Secret History of the End of an Empire (2007) Audio • Empire: Mahatma Gandhi (2022) • Empire: Muhammad Ali Jinnah (2022) • Empire: The Last Viceroy of India (2022) • Empire: Partition (2022) • Jawaharlal Nehru, Independence Day speech (1947) Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Produced by Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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1:29.3	Hello, welcome. Hello, welcome to Origin Story. In each episode we take a word, idea, event or figure from history, explain its origins and talk about how it influences political discourse today. I'm Dorian Lidski, author of Everything Must Go. And I am Ian Dunst. I'm a columnist with the Iron Newsweek. So now we are doing the second half of the story of the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947.
1:37.9	We ended at the end of 1946, which shows how eventful the next few months are going to be.
1:47.1	And one thing that really struck me is the importance of the personalities and how much people still disagree about them.
1:51.5	You know, it's interesting. Almost every book about this goes at the introduction,
1:55.1	oh, it's impossible to tell this story in a way that is going to please everybody.
1:59.1	Yeah. People have heard part one may already realize this. We probably should have said that at some point. We probably should have said that.
2:06.0	But, you know, when you're looking at the viceroys, it's like, you know, it goes without saying that neither of us are fans of the British Empire and think that it was a bad idea, as was the
2:10.9	East India Company and so on and so forth.
2:13.4	But, you know, we are where we are.
2:16.0	And the personalities are so important here.
2:19.1	So, Lord Lynn Lithgow, I think is Viceroy 36 to 43.
2:24.3	It's just like a mediocrity and an idiot.
	...

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