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It was still then possible with some persistence for Pakistanis to visit India, especially those living abroad, and my parents managed to secure theirs. I ran out of time, and figured there would be future opportunities to make the trip to India. 

But since then, the border between India and Pakistan has hardened — more so after this spring’s conflict following the Pahalgam attack in Kashmir, of those who waited up to a decade for permission. Now, I imagine it’s nearly impossible for me to get that visa without a special invitation.

Partition’s 78th anniversary just passed, and the border between India and Pakistan has not only has calcified over time; it has also managed to cleave how we imagine our histories in unnatural ways, divorcing centuries of shared culture, history and language. For those in the diaspora who are the descendants of the 15 million who migrated after these countries became independent from the British, it has created a double displacement — the sense that you can never, truly, go home.

The borders drawn up by British lawyer Cyril Radcliffe in 1947 — who had five weeks to complete this task and had previously not been east of Paris — determined new citizenships for 400 million people across India and Pakistan, and what would eventually become Bangladesh. 

Outside the subcontinent, saying you are Indian, Pakistani or Bangladeshi is assumed to be uncomplicated, a way to locate what type of brown person you are. I’ve resisted this need to slot immigrants into convenient boxes by looking closely at not only my family history, but many personal stories. 

These narratives provide colour and shade to the broad strokes of history, allowing me to understand how my family has been shaped by multiple migrations, and why there’s no singular culture I can refer to explain my roots.

I never gave deep thought to how Partition shaped both my families, until I started writing a book about my paternal grandmother, who was 25 at the time of independence. My youngest uncle prompted a shift in perspective when he said something that struck me during an interview: “We were refugees.�

I realized then my understanding of Partition had been limited — as something that happened in August 1947, not something that unfolded over a decade. My father’s family made the final move from India to Pakistan in 1956, and I finally saw this wasn’t a belated consequence of Partition, but rather, part of its story.

Partition was the largest mass migration of the 20th century, and the resulting violence left an estimated one to two million dead. “Even by the standards of the violent twentieth century, the Partition of India is remembered for its carnage,� writes Yasmine Khan in her seminal book on the subject, The Great Partition. “It seems that the aim was not only to kill, but to break people.�

The violence also endured beyond 1947. My mother, born in Pakistan post-Partition, recently told me about her family’s departure from their small town in Uttar Pradesh in 1948. It was prompted by her cousin stepping out of a taxi, only for his shoe to sink into a pool of blood — a frightening reminder of the ongoing communal conflict. Terrified of the continued strife, he begged his mother to leave, who refused until her brother — my grandfather — agreed to move with them. 

An extended exploratory visit to Karachi in 1951 caused my paternal grandfather’s home in Hyderabad to be usurped by the new state, as empty homes on both sides of the border were assumed to be abandoned, and being given to new arrivals. His was one of many court cases filed at the time reclaiming property, made easier in his case because no one had occupied it before his return. 

It was that home the family finally left in 1956.My father only returned once more, in 1983, finding his childhood home that once used to be on the outskirts of the city, now part of urban sprawl. By 2010, his ancestral graveyard had been built over and he could no longer find the home, seemingly swallowed by the ever-growing city.

My connection to India itself would have been swallowed up by the false narrative of how separate the nations appear to be today, had I not started to ask questions about how my family experienced this seismic historical event. While there are volumes of literature on Partition, there is something about locating myself in history that became the starting point of mapping out both the larger story of Partition, and the details within it that impacted ordinary people, that have started to unravel my once-limited understanding of the past.

As we are losing the last generation who have firsthand accounts, it’s been heartening to see a wave of efforts to capture them, so that the nuanced history of South Asia isn’t overshadowed by simplistic binaries. , an Instagram account and Substack run by Brampton-based Ahsun Zafar, has covered everything from the tattoos of Partition to how one family’s cuisine changed as a result of migration. Indian historian Aanchal Malhotra’s work focuses on oral histories and archive objects, for instance, examining the stories behind 21 objects carried across the border . She also co-founded the , a digital repository of items from 1970 and earlier collected from the subcontinent. The Citizen Archive of Pakistan has an and has collected more than 5,000 accounts of everything from pre-Partition life, to Partition itself and early days of the country. 

And then there’s my favourite genre, the family memoir. I was floored by author and journalist Mishal Husain’s book , a detailed political retelling of the events that led to Partition and also insight into two families’ everyday lives during that era. One passage in particular from her paternal grandfather, who grew up in Multan, stayed with me. “Our homeland speaks to our most intimate memories, moves our deepest emotions,� Husain quotes from her grandfather’s memoir. “Everything that is part of it belongs to us in some measure. And in a way we belong to it too, as a leaf belongs to a tree.� 

When the conflict broke out between Pakistan and India this spring, I shared on Instagram how much I learned from the vivid portraits of Partition by writer Saadat Hasan Manto, who despite longing to stay in India, eventually moved to Pakistan, but was never quite being able to separate the two as cleanly as the line on the map was drawn. 

I wrote that I hoped to visit one day, to see where my paternal grandmother was born in Ambehta, where my maternal grandfather lived in Nehtaur, where my father played as a child in Hyderabad. And then hope appeared in friendship — an Indian friend I’ve grown close with in London responded: “We’ll get you to India one day.â€�