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The History Hour

Seventy-five years since India's Partition

The History Hour

BBC

History, Society & Culture, Personal Journals

4.4879 Ratings

🗓️ 20 August 2022

⏱️ 52 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Max Pearson presents a compilation of stories marking 75 years since India's Partition. We'll hear the stories of people from both sides of the divide and find out about partition’s effect on the subcontinent’s diaspora.

Also, the daughter of the last British Viceroy in India, Lord Mountbatten, remembers the transfer of power in 1947.

Plus, we'll hear about the death of India's first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and how one of India’s greatest poets known as the ‘Bard of Bengal’, Rabindranath Tagore, became the first non-European to win a Nobel Prize for Literature.

(Photo: Wrecked buildings after communal riots in Amritsar, Punjab, during the Partition of British India, March 1947. Credit: Getty Images)

Transcript

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0:00.0

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0:07.0

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0:11.0

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0:15.0

Wherever you found, this podcast.

0:20.0

Hello and welcome to the History Hour podcast from the BBC World Service with me Max Pearson, the past

0:25.4

brought to life by those who were there.

0:27.8

This week we're marking 75 years since the partition of India, an event of tragic proportions, many thousands dead and millions forced to move.

0:36.0

The slaughter happened as Muslim and Hindu fought and fled to their new homelands.

0:41.0

It was scared. It was the stanchard das which are still haven't forgotten.

0:45.9

It's still, I can still smell it, you know, when I think about it. What happened there?

0:51.3

We'll hear how and why the sectarian violence unfolded

0:54.4

and look at the legacy of leaders at the time,

0:56.5

including India's Uncle Nereu.

0:58.8

He was not bound by any ideology.

1:01.6

He was doing what he thought practical. His commitment was to India, first,

1:07.0

last and always.

1:09.0

And there's a British perspective as the last Viceroy's family watched the independence celebrations.

1:14.8

The stands, where we should have sat, were submerged completely under this crowd of people.

1:21.2

And as I got out of the car I thought the world has gone mad.

1:26.5

That's all coming up later in the podcast so it's been 75 years since India won its

1:30.8

independence from the British and split into two new states that would rule themselves.

...

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