Independence and Partition of British India

Date

14–15 August 1947

Category

Politics & governance

Region

South Asia (India and Pakistan)

Era

Contemporary

Significance

At midnight on 14–15 August 1947 the British Raj was dissolved and replaced by two independent dominions, Pakistan (14 August) and India (15 August), under the Indian Independence Act passed by the UK Parliament on 18 July 1947.

The transfer of power, overseen by the last viceroy Lord Mountbatten, ended nearly two centuries of British rule and was driven by the long Indian nationalist movement led by figures such as Mohandas Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, and by the Muslim League's demand for a separate state under Muhammad Ali Jinnah. Partition divided the subcontinent along religious lines, splitting Punjab and Bengal and creating East and West Pakistan. The hastily drawn Radcliffe boundaries triggered one of the largest mass migrations in history, with an estimated 10–15 million people displaced and communal violence killing somewhere between several hundred thousand and two million people. Independence inaugurated the era of large-scale decolonisation in Asia and Africa, while the unresolved status of Kashmir and the partition's legacy of communal conflict shaped South Asian politics for decades.

Empires active in 14–15 August 1947

• Soviet Union
  1922 CE – 1991 CE
• Empire of Japan
  1868 CE – 1947 CE
• French Colonial Empire (Second)
  1830 CE – 1962 CE
• British Empire
  1583 CE – 1997 CE
• Spanish Empire
  1492 CE – 1976 CE
• Portuguese Empire
  1415 CE – 1999 CE

Related politics & governance events

• Establishment of Apartheid in South Africa
  1948
• Founding of the People's Republic of China
  1 October 1949
• Construction of the Berlin Wall
  13 August 1961
• Iranian Revolution
  January–February 1979
• Gorbachev's glasnost and perestroika
  1985–1991 (from 11 March 1985)
• Fall of the Berlin Wall
  9 November 1989

Also relevant

• Churchill's "Iron Curtain" speech at Fulton
  5 March 1946
• Japan Adopts Its Postwar "Peace Constitution"
  1947

Further reading

Midnight's Furies: The Deadly Legacy of India's Partition

If you read one book

Midnight's Furies: The Deadly Legacy of India's Partition

Nisid Hajari

Fast-paced narrative of Partition and its violence.

Get it on Amazon →

Also worth reading

• Freedom at Midnight — Larry CollinsAmazon →
• The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan — Yasmin KhanAmazon →

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