Context Presentation
By: Jake Schott
For my context research presentation, I will be discussing the Partition of India. The Partition of India occurred in 1947 due to the British rule of India at the time. When Britain colonized India they purposefully created division among the Muslims and Hindus (Reyes 2020). Therefore after 300 years of British rule the people of India wanted Britain to leave. Britain agreed to leave India after WWII because they could not afford the economic burden at the time. However, in an attempt to keep peace in the country it was divided into two nation states Pakistan and India. Pakistan was to be for the Muslims and India was for the Hindus. However, partitioning India created even more division and distain between the two religions. I have listed a few of the most shocking statistics that I found while researching the Partition to give you all a taste of how terrible it was.
- Approximately 15 million people had to uproot their lives and move to a different region of the country (Azhar 2020).
- Between 1-2 million people lost their lives due to religious violence, disease and starvation.
- Mistreatment of women was so intense it drove many women to commit suicide so they could die honorably (Benigno 2020).
- India and Pakistan have fought many wars over rights to different territories and resources.
- The Partition still affects nearly 1.6 billion people.
As you can see the Partition had devasting effects on the people of India and surrounding countries. This could have been avoided if it wasn’t for British colonization and the misguided partition that they created. I would recommend diving deeper into partition as there is much more to discuss than I can write about here. This will help with your understanding of “When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine.”
Azhar, Shahram. “Class Analysis of the Experience of Migration during the Partition of India.” South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, vol. 43, no. 3, June 2020, pp. 407–428. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1080/00856401.2020.1738109.
Benigno, Tina Belinda. “Mother and the Child in the Partition of British India (1947) and the Anti-Sikh Pogrom in and Surrounding Delhi (1984).” Sikh Formations: Religion, Culture, Theory, vol. 16, no. 4, Dec. 2020, pp. 410–422. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1080/17448727.2020.1741182.
Reyes, Paul. “Aanchal Malhotra: A Human History of Partition.” Virginia Quarterly Review, vol. 96, no. 3, Fall 2020, pp. 20–25. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=146331082&site=ehost-live.
Hi Jake, I really enjoyed your blog post on the Partition of India. Honestly, I didn’t even know this was a thing, so I found your post to be quite interesting and informative. I would be very interested to learn more and better understand this important part of history.
This is mind blowing, especially for something I did not know of. I enjoy reading this blog because it takes something I have not even heard of and helps tie it into how it affects India today too. You never think that a colonization had so much affect on all regions. It is crazy how that many people had to change their whole life!
Hi Jake!
I enjoyed reading your post, and I found the facts to also be shocking. I did not know that Britain was involved in partitioning India, and it is just another example of how their intrusion led to disruption in the future countries. It is also sad how many people it affected.
This reminded me of the extreme segregation and discrimination through the 1900’s specifically. White Americans discriminator and segregated African-American people and it led to some violence, even today. This is similar to how the British segregated two groups of religious people (Hindu and Muslims), and how it resulted in violence and conflict, even today.
Hi Jake. This presentation was very helpful especially after reading When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine. Although Lilia’s father explains it, having a presentation such as this helps to fully understand what was going on better. The statistics that you talk about are also very sad to read about as so many people have been negatively affected due to this divide between people.
This is a really insightful presentation between Hindu and Muslims. The start of the chain reaction of violence and the non-peaceful treaty would be by the separation that was in place between the two for many years. Through human history, there have been many different styles of separation that causes a devastating effect on both sides and the ones that are caught in between, an example of this would be segregation between the white and African American that took centuries to almost end but it still racism still goes on and have harmful effects through it. As well as a huge and painful example would be the holocaust between the germans and jews that did a horrible amount of harm and took so long for the harm to finish but the after-effects still lingered just like the information that you gave for the presentation.
Great presentation, Jake! Those statistics are grueling. There were so many lives taken; it is deeply saddening. In the first paragraph, I was surprised to read that the British “purposefully” created the division in India. It makes me wonder what their motives were. I did not know much about the Partition, but your presentation provided great insight.
Hi Jake! This presentation is very helpful for this week’s reading! I had no idea that any of this happened, so it is very interesting to learn about. It is very sad to see how many people were affected through your statistics. Those did a good job of emphasizing the point of your presentation.
Great presentation. This really helped with some of this weeks reading. Those are staggering statistics as well. It is hard to believe that people are still feeling the effects decades later. This is very sad to say the least. Nonetheless, this presentation was helpful and I may have to look into it more.
Hi Jake. Thanks for this great context presentation! This information is really helpful in perceiving a lot of the culture differences we see between the US and India and helps explain some of the conflict we see in terms of these cultures coming into contact.