This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
For decades the British government had resisted Indian independence while negotiating, inconclusively, with the Indian National Congress and the Muslim League over what form self-government should take. By 1946 the League, led by Muhammad Ali Jinnah, was committed to a separate Muslim state, and rioting between Hindus and Muslims that August in Calcutta, which killed thousands in a matter of days, convinced the incoming British viceroy, Lord Mountbatten, that partition could not wait. He moved the date of independence forward by nearly a year, to August 1947, and gave a British lawyer who had never before visited India, Cyril Radcliffe, five weeks to draw the actual border.
The Radcliffe Line, splitting the provinces of Punjab and Bengal between India and the new state of Pakistan, was not published until two days after independence itself, on 17 August 1947, leaving millions of people uncertain which country they now lived in. What followed in Punjab especially was among the worst violence of the twentieth century: organized massacres, the abduction and assault of tens of thousands of women along religious lines, and the burning of entire villages, carried out by Hindu, Muslim and Sikh mobs against each other as the colonial police and army, themselves splitting along the new religious border, lost control.
Refugee columns many miles long crossed the new frontier in both directions for months afterward, in what became the largest mass migration in recorded history. The violence gradually subsided by early 1948, but the mutual distrust it left behind has shaped India-Pakistan relations, and periodically flared into open war between the two states, ever since.