Welcome back to Origin Story. This week we begin the immense story of the partition of India and Pakistan at midnight on 14-15 August 1947. In a stroke, 340 million people gained independence from the British Empire but a day of celebration came in the midst of horrific ethnic violence which left between 1 and 2 million people dead and more than 15 million displaced in the largest ever movement of people. Historians have argued ever since about whether this traumatic bloodshed, and partition itself, could have been avoided if different politicians had made different decisions.

We start by introducing the key players in India, all of them British-educated lawyers: Mahatma Gandhi, the spiritual leader who became an international icon through his use of nonviolent protest to demand independence; Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the Muslim leader who rebounded from numerous defeats to become the father of Pakistan; and Jawaharlal Nehru, who wanted nothing more than to hold India together as a secular, multicultural state.

On the British side, Clement Attlee was determined to bring the Raj to a peaceful conclusion, Winston Churchill was equally obsessed with preserving it, and viceroys Lord Linlithgow and Archibald Wavell took very different approaches to Indian nationalism.

The story takes us from late Victorian London to the Amritsar massacre, and from Gandhi’s triumphant Salt March to the disaster of the Quit India campaign during the Second World War. We see Pakistan go from a utopian fantasy to a plausible reality while believers in a united India do everything they can to prevent it. And as negotiations falter, riots and pogroms begin to inflame the country. We end on the cusp of 1947 as Lord Mountbatten becomes the last viceroy and partition looks almost inevitable.

To what extent did the personalities of a handful of politicians in India and Britain dictate the course of world history? How did Jinnah bring Pakistan to life? Does Gandhi deserve his saintly reputation? And why don't we like to talk about it?

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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

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