The British judge Cyril Radcliff was given less than 40 days to remap an empire of 300 years. The new states of India and Pakistan needed to be partitioned, and Muslims and Hindus had to be separated, divided and protected by a new boundary.
It was done. Like a zephyr, the British were gone. A tempest of impending doom unleashed.
This week marks the 70th anniversary of that catastrophe also known as the independence of India and Pakistan.
But the independence of India and Pakistan is also antipodean in nature: independence via partition.
Freedom had come through the largest human migrations recorded and a million dead bodies. Hindus and Sikhs travelling to India, and Muslims travelling to Pakistan, were pulled off trains, murdered, raped and mutilated. All communities were guilty of pillage.
The land that touted non-violent civil disobedience as the necessary antidote to British imperialism would eventually give birth to two nations built on the backs of communal hatred.
As the story goes, Muslims in undivided India refused to live under Hindu rule after the departure of the British. Through the negotiations of Mohammed Ali Jinnah and the Muslim League, the British warmed to the idea of the two-nation theory - a theory that Muslims and Hindus in the Indian subcontinent were two separate “nations” with diverging interests, and thus had to be separated. The Indian National Congress, led by Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, were “forced” to eventually give their consent to partition. Mainstream discourse "blames" Jinnah for Pakistan but the story, it turns out, is a lot more complex.
For starters, the formation of India and Pakistan was neither straightforward nor linear.
It was messy and polarising, confusing and baffling.
Jinnah was primarily concerned with the prospect of Hindu majoritarian rule, a scenario not unlike the India of today. While debates have ensued whether Jinnah actually “wanted” partition - one thing is clear - he wanted the Muslim-majority regions of the subcontinent to have greater autonomy to conduct their own affairs.
It took months before the 500-plus kingdoms or “princely states” came on board. There was Hyderabad, whose leader wanted independence, Jodhpur which wanted to join Pakistan. There was Kashmir, which was later forcibly partitioned between India and Pakistan. Some Muslims refused to leave India, but eventually did so in the face of a Hindu-nation. Likewise, some Sikhs and Hindus who remained in Pakistan felt compelled to convert to avoid persecution.
But historians have found that Hindus and Muslims lived in India for centuries in relative harmony. In the shrines of Ajmer or Nizamuddin, there existed (as they still do today) a syncretism that blurred lines between communities.
As hard as it may be to believe, "Hindu" and "Muslim" in India in the early modern period were not the political identities they are today; people would have been identified by their language, caste or their geographical background. It was under colonial rule that the relations soured, that political identities formed most poignantly and unity was seen as untenable.
But every story needs a villain. And in many ways, Pakistan has fit the bill. Under the shadow of the inevitable Muslim ghetto, India has managed to seal the “secular” tag despite its crimes against those lower on the pecking order, including Dalits, Muslims and Tribals.
Pakistan, chastised for its enduring coups and military rule, has made illiberalism its own. Both India and Pakistan have dynasty politics, high-level corruption and right-wing fascism, but only one has secured the label.
But even then, the idea of partition was little more than the signature dish of British and French colonisation. It was the policy of divide and rule.
Territories were, by definition, divided among empires, with little thought to the consequences on community or people. Notably, the Berlin Conference in 1884 divided Africa, and Sykes-Picot partitioned the territories of the Ottoman Empire in 1916.
Later, when colonisation was on its last legs, given the cost of World War II, these territories were partitioned among the “native elites”, often creating new quandaries for people in these territories.
In other words, dividing a land and a people was not a novel idea for the time. The idea of partition may have come across as a locally sourced solution, but it certainly was not the case.
And yet, the independence of India and Pakistan in 1947 in many ways paved the way for the end of colonialism in other parts of the globe, particularly in Africa. It gifted an esteem to freedom fighters and movements across the African continent.
But the division of India and East and West Pakistan was followed by the partition of Palestine and the creation of Israel, leaving behind a fraught legacy in the Middle East as well as in South Asia.
The very idea of dividing people by religion, race or ethnicity has always been unnatural, and yet, as history has proven to us time and again, very instrumental in driving people apart.
I remember in 2004 when the Indian cricket team travelled to Pakistan for their first fully fledged tour of the country in 14 years. Indian fans reported experiencing "surprising" hospitality across the border. The media jumped on board, too.
No-one seemed to ask why they should have expected any less from common people so far removed from the animosity created by the state narrative.
People have been taught to believe that hate is primordial; it is not. It is, as with most things, an active construction. There are those who set to gain from intolerance, and those who are willing to believe them because of their own insecurities and fears.
To the common woman, man, boy and girl, partition carries multiple meanings based on the familial histories - of friends lost, of desires quashed, of big and small betrayals; to some it certainly means nothing.
People, it turns out, can be bigger than boundaries drawn on the lines of a map. But it is not always in their own hands to make a choice.
* Azad Essa is a journalist at Al Jazeera. He is also co-founding editor of The Daily Vox
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.