{"id":81166,"date":"2026-04-27T21:09:23","date_gmt":"2026-04-28T01:09:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/apnaorg.com\/wp\/articles\/one-womans-quest-to-record-the-history-of-the-1947\/"},"modified":"2026-04-27T21:08:58","modified_gmt":"2026-04-28T01:08:58","slug":"one-womans-quest-to-record-the-history-of-the-1947","status":"publish","type":"articles","link":"https:\/\/apnaorg.com\/wp\/articles\/one-womans-quest-to-record-the-history-of-the-1947\/","title":{"rendered":"One Woman’s Quest to Record the History of the 1947"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Anjali Enjeti<\/em> <\/strong><\/p>\n

The News :<\/strong> May 4, 2016<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

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Singh Bhalla with Partition witness Trilok Singh Suri in Chandigarh, Haryana, India.Photo by Metha Daoheung<\/p>\n

mps._execAd(“interstitial”); When Guneeta Singh Bhalla was 19 years old, her paternal grandmother Harbhajan Kaur sat her down at her home in New Jersey to relay a harrowing migration story.<\/span><\/p>\n

The date was August 1947. The place, Lahore, a city in the northern state of Punjab, in what was once India, but what was now the new Muslim majority country of Pakistan. Almost overnight, Sikhs, Hindus, and Muslims who’d lived in Lahore for generations in peace turned on one another. Kaur, a Sikh, was forced to abandon her family estate and board a train with her three young children — ages four, three, and one — to Amritsar, a small city just inside the new border of India. For six months, she was separated from her husband. The dead bodies, the horrific violence she witnessed haunted her for the rest of her life.<\/span><\/p>\n

mps._execAd(“boxinline”); Singh Bhalla was rapt. As a child growing up in India, she’d heard fragments of partition stories from both sides of her family tree. But on that day in 2000, the details of her grandmother’s journey shifted something within her. She began to understand the story’s significance in the history of a fractured, post-colonial India. Singh Bhalla began to wonder how many other survivors like her grandmother held similar memories of the division of the subcontinent and why partition was absent from the American education Singh Bhalla received after she moved with her family to the States at age 10.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Muslim refugees sit on the roof of an overcrowded train near New Delhi as they try to flee India on Sept. 19, 1947. In the partition of the subcontinent into India and Pakistan after gaining independence from Britain in 1947, an estimated 1 million Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs were killed in rioting, and 12 million were uprooted from their homes.AP File<\/p>\n

What Singh Bhalla soon learned, she told NBC News, was that there was no public memorial, archive, or permanent museum to remember the one million who perished, and the 15 million who crossed the British-drawn Radcliffe Line in what would come to be known as largest refugee movement in history. Singh Bhalla couldn’t believe it. “I thought partition needed to be preserved and documented,” she said in a phone call from Lahore, where she was on business.
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Faruk Ansari, a witness of the 1947 Partition interviewed by the 1947 Partition Archive.Courtesy of 1947 Partition Archive<\/p>\n

But as a college student in Florida, it was a task she didn’t feel she could take on herself.<\/span><\/p>\n

In 2008, while pursuing a Ph.D. in Florida, Singh Bhalla spent time studying at the University of Tokyo. On a day off, she took a trip to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum<\/span>,<\/span> the site that honors the victims of the Aug. 1, 1945, atomic bombing. The Memorial’s oral history videos captivated Singh Bhalla. She drew the connection between the survivors of Hiroshima and the survivors of partition. “I decided, at that moment, to do something to preserve partition stories,” Singh Bhalla said.<\/span><\/p>\n

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