ON THIS DAY ·
Radcliffe Line
17 Aug 1947 — The Radcliffe award appeared two days after freedom. Between Lahore and Amritsar, its new border crossed the Grand Trunk Road. A customs post grew at the meeting of a pencil line drawn in five weeks and a thousand-year-old highway.
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The moment in context
Mountbatten came to India in March 1947 with broad powers and a deadline of June 1948 for transferring power. Within ten weeks he had concluded that the interim government could not hold. Congress and the Muslim League could not agree on a workable center, and partition became the settlement: British India would be divided into two dominions, while the princely states would follow a separate process of accession. Nehru and Patel accepted the division of Punjab and Bengal; Jinnah accepted what he called a “moth-eaten Pakistan.”
From Partition of India, chapter 13 of Indian Independence & Partition, 1857–1964 (AUG 1947).
The place: Radcliffe Line — map and full story →
Teach this in 5 minutes
- Why it happened — The seventy-three-day timetable. Mountbatten’s defenders saw a state in danger of dissolving. The Punjab crisis suggested that delay might bring civil war and an army no longer…
- The turn — The award published, 17 August 1947. The flags rose before the border was announced. On 17 August the award revealed the line, and fifteen million people discovered which side their…
- What it changed — Two states built from one civil service. A single government’s assets had to be divided between two states. The division reached from army regiments split by religion to library sets…
Then ask the room: Mountbatten advanced independence by ten months. Weigh the decision: did speed avert a greater catastrophe, or cause the one that happened? The argued answer is on the chapter page →
The atlas that shows it
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