Partition’s legacy transcends India-Pakistan border. Can commemoration?

Salman Rashid and Mohinder Pratab Sehgal had an unlikely friendship. It struck immediately after they met and lasted until Mr. Sehgal died. After all, the two had been looking for each other all their lives.

In 2008, Mr. Rashid set out from his home in Lahore, Pakistan, carrying a photo of his grandfather’s house in Jalandhar, India. The 80-mile journey might seem simple, for an acclaimed travel writer like Mr. Rashid, but this was a deeply personal quest. His father and some other relatives had survived the Partition, the violent end of British India in 1947. But there were no answers as to how his grandparents had died, or what had happened to his aunts. No one had heard from the women since the subcontinent’s division into Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan – which led to the largest mass migration the world has ever witnessed.

There was complete silence in his house about Partition. Nobody ever talked about it. All that was passed on to Mr. Rashid was that the family must have died, because there were no Muslims left in Jalandhar. So he set off to find the answers himself.

As the British left India, after 200 years of rule, they left a territory divided in

“I have to ask forgiveness”Past is presentLiving memory