Mountbatten was killed by an IRA bomb on 27 August 1979, aged 79, and his ceremonial funeral in Westminster Abbey was attended by the the royal family.

Here are 10 facts about Louis Mountbatten.

1. Mountbatten was not his original surname

Louis Mountbatten was born on 25 June 1900 in Frogmore House, in the grounds of Windsor Castle. He was the son of Prince Louis of Battenberg and Princess Victoria of Hesse.

He lost his full title, ‘His Serene Highness, Prince Louis Francis Albert Victor Nicholas of Battenberg’ (nicknamed ‘Dickie’ for short) – when he and other royals dropped Germanic names in 1917 during World War One and the family changed their name from Battenberg to Mountbatten.

2. He shared close links with the British royal family

Lord Mountbatten’s great-grandmother (and indeed one of his godparents) was Queen Victoria, who attended his baptism. His other godparent was Tsar Nicholas II.

Lord Mountbatten’s godparents – Left: Queen Victoria holds Lord Louis Mountbatten; Right: Tsar Nicholas II.

Lord Mountbatten was also Queen Elizabeth II’s second cousin, and the uncle of Prince Phillip. (His older sister, Princess Alice of Greece and Denmark, was Prince Philip’s mother.)

Estranged from his father at a young age, Prince Philip developed a close relationship with his uncle who took on a father figure role after Philip’s family was exiled from Greece in the 1920s. Indeed it was Lord Mountbatten that introduced Prince Phillip to a 13 year-old Princess Elizabeth in 1939. Before marrying into the British royal family, Prince Philip needed to renounce his title as Prince of Greece, so took his uncle’s surname instead.

King Charles III is Lord Mountbatten’s grand-nephew, and Prince William and Kate Middleton called their youngest son Louis, supposedly after him.

3. His ship was immortalised in a film

Mountbatten joined the Royal Navy in 1916, specialising in communications and received his first command in 1934 on the destroyer HMS Daring.

In May 1941, his ship HMS Kelly was sunk by German dive-bombers off the coast of Crete, losing more than half the crew. HMS Kelly and its captain, Mountbatten, were later immortalised in the 1942 British patriotic war film ‘In Which We Serve’.

Within British naval circles, Mountbatten was nicknamed ‘the Master of Disaster’ for his penchant of getting into messes.

4. He predicted the attack at Pearl Harbour

While in command of HMS Illustrious, Mountbatten visited the American naval base at Pearl Harbour and was shocked by what he perceived as a lack of security and preparedness. This prompted him to think America would be dragged into the war by a surprise Japanese attack.

At the time, this was dismissed, but Mountbatten was proved correct just three months later by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour on 7 December 1941.

5. He oversaw the disastrous Dieppe Raid

In April 1942, Mountbatten was appointed Chief of Combined Operations, with responsibility for the preparation of the eventual invasion of occupied Europe.

Mountbatten wanted to give troops practical experience of beach landing, and on 19 August 1942, the Allied forces launched a seaborne raid on the German-occupied port of Dieppe in France. Within 10 hours, of the 6,086 men who landed, 3,623 had been killed, wounded or become prisoners of war.

The Dieppe Raid proved one of the most disastrous missions of the war, and was considered one of the biggest failures of Mountbatten’s naval career. Despite this, he was enlisted to help plan for D-Day.

6. He was appointed the Supreme Allied Commander, South East Asia Command (SEAC)

In August 1943, Churchill appointed Mountbatten the Supreme Allied Commander, South East Asia Command. He attended the historic 1945 Potsdam Conference and oversaw the recapture of Burma and Singapore from the Japanese by the end of 1945.

For his war service, Mountbatten was created Viscount Mountbatten of Burma in 1946, and Earl in 1947.

7. He was the last Viceroy of India and its first Governor-General

In March 1947, Mountbatten was made Viceroy to India, with a mandate by Clement Attlee to oversee an exit deal with Indian leaders by October 1947, or oversee the British withdrawal with no deal by June 1948. Mountbatten’s job was to make the transition from colonial property to independent nation as seamless as possible. 

India was on the verge of civil war, divided between followers of Jawaharlal Nehru (rumoured as Mountbatten’s wife’s lover), who wanted a united, Hindu-led India, and Mohammad Ali Jinnah, who wanted a separate Muslim state.

Lord and Lady Mountbatten meet Mr Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the future leader of Pakistan.

Image Credit: Image IND 5302, collections of the Imperial War Museums / Public Domain

Mountbatten was unable to persuade Jinnah of the benefits of a united, independent India. To expedite matters and avoid civil war, in June 1947 in a joint press conference with the Congress and the Muslim League, Mountbatten announced Britain had accepted the partition of India. He outlined the division of British India between the two new dominions of India and the newly created state of Pakistan, in the ‘Mountbatten Plan’.

The partition on religious lines resulted in widespread inter-communal violence. More than a million people were killed, and over 14 million forcibly relocated.

Mountbatten remained as interim Governor-General of India until June 1948, then served as the country’s first Governor General.

8. Both he and his wife had many affairs

Mountbatten married Edwina Ashley on 18 July 1922, but both admitted many affairs during their marriage, particularly Edwina who is said to have engaged in 18 trysts. It is thought they eventually agreed on a ‘discreet’ open marriage to spare the shame of a divorce.

After Edwina died in 1960, Mountbatten had several relationships with other women including actress Shirley MacLaine. In 2019, FBI documents dating from 1944 became public, revealing claims about Mountbatten’s sexuality and alleged perversions.

Louis and Edwina Mounbatten

9. He famously provided mentorship to King Charles

The two shared a close relationship, with Charles once referring to Mountbatten as his ‘honorary grandfather’.

Mountbatten advised the then Prince Charles on his relationships and his future marriage, encouraging Charles to enjoy his bachelor life, then marry a young, inexperienced girl to ensure a stable married life. This advice contributed to the prevention of Prince Charles from initially marrying Camilla Shand (later Parker Bowles). Mountbatten later wrote to Charles warning that his affair with Camilla meant he was on the same downward slope that had changed his uncle, King Edward VIII’s life, with his marriage to Wallis Simpson.

Mountbatten even attempted to set Charles up with his granddaughter, Amanda Knatchbull, but to no avail.

Prince Charles with Lord and Lady Louis Mountbatten at Cowdray Park Polo Club in 1971

Image Credit: Michael Chevis / Alamy

10. He was killed by the IRA

Mountbatten was murdered on 27 August 1979 when IRA terrorists blew up his boat while he was fishing with family off the coast of County Sligo in north-west Ireland, near his family’s summer home at Classiebawn Castle on the Mullaghmore Peninsula. 

The night before, IRA member Thomas McMahon had attached a bomb onto Mountbatten’s unguarded boat, the Shadow V, which was detonated shortly after Mountbatten and his party left the shore the next day. Mountbatten, his two grandsons and a local boy were all killed, the Dowager Lady Brabourne later died from her injuries.

The assassination was seen as a show of strength by the IRA and caused public outrage. Mountbatten’s televised ceremonial funeral took place in Westminster Abbey, attended by the Queen, the royal family and other European royals.

2 hours prior to the bomb’s detonation, Thomas McMahon had been arrested on suspicion of driving a stolen vehicle. Police later noticed flecks of paint on McMahon’s clothes which forensic evidence concluded matched Mountbatten’s boat. McMahon was sentenced to life imprisonment, but released in 1998 under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement.

Not only a renowned scientist, Sarabhai was an industrialist, an institution builder, a social reformer and visionary whose fierce commitment to Indian independence fuelled his work to sky-rocket India into the 20th century.

From India to England, the stars and beyond, here’s the story of Vikram Sarabhai.

An industrious beginning

Vikram Ambalal Sarabhai was born on 12 August 1919 into the well-known Sarabhai family. The Sarabhai’s were major industrialists committed to securing India’s independence from British colonial rule, encouraging Vikram to study science at Gujarat College in Ahmedabad.

Sarabhai’s study then took him to the University of Cambridge in England, where he sat his final exams in natural sciences in 1940. By this time, war had engulfed Europe, Britain and its colonies, including India. Sarabhai returned to his homeland where he began researching cosmic rays.

With the end of war in 1945, Sarabhai returned to Cambridge to complete a doctorate, writing the thesis ‘Cosmic Ray Investigations in Tropical Latitudes’ in 1947.

Vikram and Mrinalini Sarabhai (1948)

Image Credit: Jigneshnat, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Father of the Indian Space Program

Back in India again, Sarabhai founded the Physical Research Laboratory in Ahmedabad. The lab came to be known as the ‘cradle of space sciences’ in India, and initially focused its research on cosmic rays and the upper atmosphere. This research soon expanded to include theoretical and radio physics, funded by the Atomic Energy Commission.

He established the Indian National Committee for Space Research in 1962 (renamed the Indian Space Research Organisation or ISRO), as well as the Thumba Equatorial Rocket Launching Station. Both institutions remain in operation today.

What else should Sarabhai be remembered for?

Sarabhai’s interests were not limited to space. He was committed to developing industry, business and other socio-economic issues India faced.

Alongside managing his family’s business group, Sarabhai founded numerous non-profit organisations such as the Ahmedabad Textile Industry’s Research Association, which he managed between 1947 and 1956. From this experience, he saw the need for professional management education in India.

Under British colonial rule, management positions had commonly been assumed by British colonists. Sarabhai therefore played a large role in setting up the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad in 1962.

Sarabhai had married Mrinalini Sarabhai, a classical Indian dancer from a prominent family committed to Indian independence in 1940. Despite a troublesome marriage, together they founded the Darpana Academy of Performing Arts to promote traditional Indian crafts culture in Ahmedabad.

Dr. Vikram A. Sarabhai, (left) and Dr. Thomas O. Paine, NASA Administrator

Image Credit: NASA, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

After the death of India’s leading physicist Homi Bhabha in 1966, Sarabhai was appointed chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission of India. He avidly continued Bhabha’s work in nuclear research, establishing India’s nuclear power plants and even taking the first steps towards India’s development of nuclear defence technology in the uncertain Cold War climate.

He devised programs to take education to remote villages using satellite communication and called for satellites to be used in searching for natural resources.

Ultimately, Sarabhai passionately believed all aspects of science and technology, especially anything related to space, were “levers of development”. Through science, Sarabhai would propel a decolonising India into a new age.

What was Vikram Sarabhai’s legacy?

One evening in December 1971, Sarabhai was reviewing a design while getting ready to head to Bombay that night. After a brief conversation with fellow space researcher Avul Pakir Jainulabdeen Abdul Kalam (who would later be President of India), Sarabhai died of a heart attack aged 52.

For his service to independent India, Sarabhai was awarded two of the country’s highest honours: the Padma Bhushan in 1966, and the Padma Vibhushan, awarded posthumously in 1972.

His contribution to science has been recognised in the years since his death in a variety of ways: one of the Indian Space Research Organisations buildings was named after him; the Vikram Sarabhai Journalism award was created in his name; and the Indian Postal Department released a commemorative stamp on the first anniversary of his death.

Undoubtedly, Sarabhai’s legacy remains the huge leaps made by Indian space and nuclear science in the years following independence, earning India a place among the world’s leading space-faring countries and Sarabhai international renown as Father of the Indian Space Program.

The murder of prominent figures has historically sparked soul-searching, mass outpourings of grief and even conspiracy theories, as people struggle to come to terms with the consequences of assassinations.

Here are 10 assassinations from history that shaped the modern world.

1. Abraham Lincoln (1865)

Abraham Lincoln is arguably America’s most famous president: he led America through the Civil War, preserved the Union, abolished slavery, modernised the economy and bolstered the federal government. A champion of black rights, including voting rights, Lincoln was disliked by Confederate states.

His assassin, John Wilkes Booth, was a Confederate spy whose self-professed motive was to avenge the Southern states. Lincoln was shot at point-blank range whilst he was at the theatre, dying the following morning.

Lincoln’s death damaged relations between the North and South of the USA: his successor, President Andrew Johnson, presided over the Reconstruction era and was lenient on Southern states and granted amnesty to many former Confederates, to the frustration of some in the North.

2. Tsar Alexander II (1881)

Tsar Alexander II was known as the ‘Liberator’, enacting wide-ranging liberal reforms across Russia. His policies included the emancipation of serfs (peasant labourers) in 1861, the abolition of corporal punishment, the promotion of self-government and the ending of some of the nobility’s historic privileges.

His reign coincided with an increasingly volatile political situation in Europe and in Russia, and he survived several assassination attempts during his rule. These were mainly orchestrated by radical groups (anarchists and revolutionaries) who wanted to overthrow Russia’s system of autocracy.

He was assassinated by a group named Narodnaya Volya (The People’s Will) in March 1881, bringing an end to an era which had promised ongoing liberalisation and reform. Alexander’s successors, worried they would meet a similar fate, enacted much more conservative agendas.

An 1881 photograph of Tsar Alexander II’s body lying in state.

Image Credit: Public Domain

3. Archduke Franz Ferdinand (1914)

In June 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, was assassinated by a Serbian named Gavilo Princip in Sarajevo. Frustrated by the Austro-Hungarian annexation of Bosnia, Princip was a member of a nationalist organisation entitled Young Bosnia, which aimed to free Bosnia from the shackles of external occupation.

The assassination is widely believed to have been the catalyst for the outbreak of World War One in August 1914: underlying factors were exacerbated in the political fallout of the Archduke’s death and from 28 June 1914, Europe began an inexorable path to war.

4. Reinhard Heydrich (1942)

Nicknamed the ‘man with the iron heart’, Heydrich was one of the most important Nazis, and one of the main architects of the Holocaust. His brutality and chilling efficiency earned him the fear and loyalty of many, and unsurprisingly, many loathed him for his role in anti-Semitic policies across Nazi Europe.

Heydrich was assassinated on the orders of the exiled Czechoslovak government: his car was bombed and he was shot at. It took Heydrich a week to die from his injuries. Hitler ordered the SS to wreak revenge in Czechoslovakia in an attempt to hunt down the assassins.

Many consider Heydrich’s assassination a major turning point in Nazi fortunes, believing that had he lived, he may well have achieved major victories against the Allies.

5. Mahatma Gandhi (1948)

One of the earliest heroes of the civil rights movement, Gandhi spearheaded non-violent resistance to British rule as part of the Indian quest for independence. Having successfully helped campaign for independence, which was achieved in 1947, Gandhi turned his attention to trying to prevent religious violence between Hindus and Muslims.

He was assassinated in January 1948 by a Hindu nationalist, Nathuram Vinayak Godse, who viewed Gandhi’s stance as too accommodating towards Muslims. His death was mourned around the world. Godse was caught, tried and sentenced to death for his actions.

6. John F. Kennedy (1963)

President John F. Kennedy was America’s darling: young, charming and idealistic, Kennedy was welcome with open arms by many in the US, particularly due to his New Frontier domestic policies and staunchly anti-Communist foreign policy. Kennedy was assassinated on 22 November 1963 in Dallas, Texas. His death shocked the nation.

Despite serving less than 3 full years in office, he is consistently ranked as one of the best and most popular presidents in American history. His assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, was apprehended, but was killed before he could be tried: many have viewed this as symptomatic of a wider cover up and a sign of conspiracy.

JFK’s assassination cast a long shadow and had a huge cultural impact in America. Politically, his successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, passed much of the legislation set in place during Kennedy’s administration.

7. Martin Luther King (1968)

As the leader of the Civil Rights Movement in America, Martin Luther King met with plenty of anger and opposition over his career, including a nearly fatal stabbing in 1958, and he regularly received violent threats. Reportedly after hearing about JFK’s assassination in 1963, King told his wife that he believed he would die by assassination too.

King was shot dead on a hotel balcony in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1968. His killer, James Earl Ray, initially pled guilty to the charge of murder, but later changed his mind. Many, including King’s family, believe his assassination was planned by the government and/or the mafia in order to silence him.

8. Indira Gandhi (1984)

Another victim of religious tensions in India, Indira Gandhi was the 3rd Prime Minister of India and remains the country’s only female leader to date. A somewhat divisive figure, Gandhi was politically intransigent: she supported the independence movement in East Pakistan and went to war over it, helping create Bangladesh.

A Hindu, she was assassinated by her Sikh bodyguards in 1984 after ordering military action in the Golden Temple at Amritsar, one of the most important sites for Sikhs. Gandhi’s death resulted in violence against Sikh communities across India, and it’s estimated over 8,000 were killed as part of this retaliation.

Indira Gandhi in Finland in 1983.

Image Credit: Finnish Heritage Agency / CC

9. Yitzhak Rabin (1995)

Yitzhak Rabin was the fifth Prime Minister of Israel: first elected in 1974, he was re-elected in 1992 on a platform that embraced the Israeli-Palestinian Peace Process. Subsequently, he signed various historic agreements as part of the Oslo Peace Accords, winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 1994.

He was assassinated in 1995 by a right-wing extremist who opposed the Oslo Accords. Many view his death as also being the demise of the kind of peace he had envisaged and worked towards, making it one of the most tragically effective political assassinations of the 20th century, in that it killed off an idea as much as a man.

10. Benazir Bhutto (2007)

The first female Prime Minister of Pakistan, and the first woman to head a democratic government in a Muslim majority country, Benazir Bhutto was one of Pakistan’s most important political figures. Killed by a suicide bomb at a political rally in 2007, her death shook the international community.

However, many were not surprised by it. Bhutto was a controversial figure who had been tarred consistently by allegations of corruption, and Islamic fundamentalists opposed her prominence and political presence. Her death was mourned by millions of Pakistanis, particularly women, who had seen the promise of a different Pakistan under her tenure.

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1. Gandhi called for nonviolent resistance to British rule

Gandhi’s doctrine of nonviolent protest was called satyagraha. It was adopted as an important device for protesting British colonial rule by the Indian independence movement. In Sanskrit and Hindi, satyagraha means “holding onto truth”. Mahatma Gandhi introduced the concept to describe a committed but nonviolent resistance to evil.

Gandhi first developed the idea of satyagraha in 1906 in opposition to legislation that discriminated against Asians in the British colony of the Transvaal in South Africa. Satyagraha campaigns took place in India from 1917 to 1947, incorporating fasting and economic boycotts.

2. Gandhi was influenced by religious concepts

Gandhi’s life led him to become familiar with religions such as Jainism. This morally exacting Indian religion had important principles such as nonviolence. This probably helped motivate Gandhi’s vegetarianism, commitment of non-injury to all living things, and notions of tolerance between faiths.

3. He studied law in London

Gandhi was called to the bar at age 22 in June 1891, having studied law at the Inner Temple, one of the four law colleges of London. He then attempted to start a successful law practice in India, before moving to South Africa where he represented an Indian merchant in a lawsuit.

Mahatma Gandhi, photographed in 1931

Image Credit: Elliott & Fry / Public Domain

4. Gandhi lived in South Africa for 21 years

He remained in South Africa for 21 years. His experience of racial discrimination in South Africa was initiated by a series of humiliations on one journey: he was removed from a railway compartment in Pietermaritzburg, beaten by a stagecoach driver and barred from “Europeans only” hotels.

In South Africa, Gandhi began political campaigns. In 1894 he drafted petitions to the Natal legislature and drew attention to the objections of Natal Indians to the passage of a discriminatory bill. He later founded the Natal Indian Congress.

5. Gandhi supported the British Empire in South Africa

Gandhi with the stretcher-bearers of the Indian Ambulance Corps during the Boer War.

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Gandhi supported the British cause during the Second Boer War (1899-1902) because he hoped the loyalty of Indians would be rewarded by the extension of voting and citizenship rights in South Africa. Gandhi served as a stretcher-bearer in the British colony of Natal.

He served again during the 1906 Bambatha Rebellion, which had been triggered after colonial authorities coerced Zulu men to enter the labour market. Again he argued that Indian service would legitimise their claims to full citizenship but this time attempted to treat Zulu casualties.

Meanwhile British assurances in South Africa did not come to fruition. As the historian Saul Dubow has noted, Britain allowed the Union of South Africa to be constituted as a white supremacist state, providing an important political lesson to Gandhi about the integrity of imperial promises.

6. In India, Gandhi emerged as a nationalist leader

Gandhi returned to India at the age of 45 in 1915. He organised peasants, farmers and urban labourers to protest against rates of land-tax and discrimination. Though Gandhi recruited soldiers for the British Indian Army, he also called for general strikes in protest of the repressive Rowlatt Acts.

Violence such as the Amritsar Massacre in 1919 stimulated the development of the first major anti-colonial movement in India. Indian nationalists including Gandhi were hereafter firmly set upon the objective of independence. The massacre itself was memorialised after independence as a key moment in the struggle for freedom.

Gandhi became the leader of the Indian National Congress in 1921. He organised campaigns across India to demand self-rule, as well as to ease poverty, extend women’s rights, develop religious and ethnic peace, and end caste-based ostracism.

7. He led the Salt March to demonstrate the power of Indian nonviolence

The Salt March of 1930 was one of the key acts of nonviolent civil disobedience organised by Mahatma Gandhi. Over 24 days and 240 miles, marchers opposed the British salt monopoly and set an example for future anti-colonial resistance.

They marched from Sabarmati Ashram to Dandi, and concluded with Gandhi breaking the salt laws of the British Raj on 6 April 1930. While the legacy of the march was not immediately apparent, it helped undermine the legitimacy of British rule by disturbing the consent of Indians on which it depended.

Gandhi during the Salt March, March 1930.

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons

8. He became known as the Great Soul

As a prominent political figure, Gandhi became associated with folk heroes and was portrayed as a messiah figure. His terminology and concepts and symbolism resonated in India.

9. Gandhi decided to live modestly

From the 1920s, Gandhi lived in a self-sufficient residential community. He ate simple vegetarian food. He fasted for long periods of time as part of his political protest and as part of his faith in self-purification.

10. Gandhi was assassinated by a Hindu nationalist

Gandhi was assassinated on 30 January 1948 by a Hindu nationalist who fired three bullets into his chest. His assassin was Nathuram Godse. When Prime Minister Nehru announced his death, he said that “the light has gone out of our lives, and there is darkness everywhere”.

After his death, the National Gandhi Museum was founded. His birthday of 2 October is commemorated as a national holiday in India. It is also the International Day of Nonviolence.

This article is an edited transcript of The Partition of India with Anita Rani, available on History Hit TV.

The Partition of India was one of the most violent episodes in Indian history. At its heart, it was a process whereby India would become independent from the British Empire.

It involved the division of India into India and Pakistan, with Bangladesh separating later.

Since different religious communities ended up on different sides of the border that they were supposed to be on, they were forced to move across, often travelling long distances. It’s shocking when you read accounts of what was taking place.

First of all, there were caravans of people walking to try and get across the border, and these people would often be walking for long periods of time.

Then there were trains, packed full of people, who might have been Muslims, leaving India to get into Pakistan or maybe vice versa – Sikhs and Hindus trying to leave what became Pakistan and get into India.

Entire trains of these people were slaughtered.

Refugees walked in caravans to try and get across the border.

Thousands of women were also kidnapped. One estimate puts the total at around 75,000 women. Maybe those women were converted to different religions and went on to have completely new families, but the truth is we just don’t know.

I was told that my grandfather’s first wife jumped into a well with her daughter to escape being murdered and there are accounts of thousands and thousands of women doing the same thing because it was seen as the most honourable way of dying.

Men and families were also choosing to kill their own women rather than have them die at the hands of the other. It is unimaginable horror.

Familial murder

I met someone who was 16 when partition happened. He was a Sikh man who had been trying to get into India from Pakistan when his family’s village was surrounded.

Now, his story is just one example of violence, and I should say that it was happening both ways – Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs were all doing the same thing.

But the Muslim men said to this particular family, “If you give us one of your daughters, we’ll let you go”. You have to remember that these families lived together in joint household. So you’d have three brothers, their wives, and all their children, and everybody would be living in a joint house.

The eldest of the family decided that rather than letting their daughters fall prey to Muslims and being raped and murdered by them, that they would kill them themselves. All the girls were put into a room and I was told that the girls bravely stepped forward to be beheaded by their father.

The death of my grandfather’s family

My grandfather’s family, who ended up in Pakistan as a result of Partition, must have realised that trouble was brewing. And so they went to the haveli (a local manor house) in the next village where a very wealthy Sikh family was giving refuge to Hindu and Sikh families.

The Hindu and Sikh men who were hiding there had erected a series of defences around the house, including a wall and a moat.

The moat was really interesting because basically overnight these men had channeled the water from one of the canals in the area to build it. They also barricaded themselves in with some guns.

There was a standoff with Muslim men outside – the majority of people in the area were Muslims – who continually attacked the haveli.

That lasted for three days before the Sikhs and Hindus inside the house just couldn’t hold out any longer and they were all brutally murdered. Everybody perished, including my great-grandfather and my grandfather’s son. I don’t know exactly what happened to my grandfather’s wife and I don’t think I’ll ever know.

Although I was told that she she jumped down a well we have no way of knowing for sure; she might have been kidnapped.

This article is an edited transcript of The Partition of India with Anita Rani, available on History Hit TV.

The Partition of India in 1947 is one of the great forgotten tragedies of the 20th century. It occurred when India became independent from the British Empire and the territory was broken into India and Pakistan.

As part of this process, the north-eastern Indian region of Bengal was split in half along religious lines into East and West Bengal. Muslim-majority East Bengal initially formed part of Pakistan but later became Bangladesh.

It was decided that India needed to be separated because it had ended up as a massive, sprawling empire. There was a precedent for such a move; both Burma (now Myanmar) and Sri Lanka had previously been separated from the Indian Empire. But then the decision came to separate it even further.

The British role

This table was used in the drawing up of the legislation that governed Partition. It is currently located in the Indian Institute of Advanced Studies in Shimla, India. Credit: Nagesh Kamath / Commons

India was divided by Sir Cyril Radcliffe, a British lawyer who had never visited the country before and had little time to grasp the social consequences of his decision.

In the north-west of India, Punjab was divided in half, with half of it becoming Pakistan and the other half remaining in India.

When India was one huge country, before Pakistan was created, Punjab was a really important state for the British Empire. It was one of the last states in India to be annexed by the British.

The scale of the tragedy

On the ground during Partition, there was incredible inter-communal violence and mass deportations and huge movements of peoples, probably the biggest in history.

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees estimates that 14 million Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims were displaced during the division of India, which makes it the largest mass migration in human history.

These communities essentially had to get to the right side of what was an arbitrary line.

It was a tragedy. Almost 15 million people were displaced, while a million people died.

There were Punjabi Muslims and Punjabi Hindus and Sikhs. But, although they had different faiths, the only thing that was different about them was the religion that they had chosen to follow; just the gods that they believed in.

They ate the same food. They spoke the same language. Culturally, they were identical; everything else was the same.

Then when Partition happened, these communities were weaponised and just went for each other. Absolute chaos ensued and hell broke out and neighbours were killing neighbours.

A map showing how India was partitioned. Credit: themightyquill / Commons

Women were used and people were kidnapping other people’s daughters and raping and murdering them.

My grandfather’s family were living in what ended up becoming Pakistan, but he was away with the British-Indian Army down in Mumbai, so thousands of miles away.

His first family just couldn’t get across the border into India and they were all slaughtered.

Accounts of these events sound almost medieval, and their effects are still being felt in the divides between India and Pakistan today.

This article is an edited transcript of The Partition of India with Anita Rani, available on History Hit TV.

The Partition of India in 1947 is one of the great forgotten disasters of the 20th century. When India became independent from the British Empire, it was simultaneously divided into India and Pakistan, with Bangladesh later separating.

During the partition of India, around 14 million Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims were displaced, according to the estimates of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, making it the largest mass migration in human history.

It was a tragedy. Not only did almost 15 million end up displaced, but a million people died.

Special refugee trains were put into service, so that people could be transported across the border, and those trains would arrive at stations with every single person on board killed, either by Sikh hordes, Muslim hordes or Hindus. Everybody was just killing each other.

Violence in the villages

My grandfather’s family were living in what ended up becoming Pakistan, but during Partition he was away with the British-Indian Army down in Mumbai, so thousands of miles away.

In the area where my grandfather’s family lived, there were little chaks, or villages, occupied by mainly either Muslim families or by Sikhs and Hindus living side by side.

There wasn’t much distance between these little villages so people like my grandfather would do business with lots of villages around.

Many of these people simply stayed in their villages after Partition. I don’t know what was going through their minds, but they must have realised that trouble was brewing.

In a neighbouring chak, a very wealthy Sikh family was taking Hindu and Sikh families in and giving them refuge.

So these people, including my grandfather’s family – but not my grandfather himself, who was away in the south – went to this next village and there were 1,000 people congregated in a haveli, which is a local manor house.

The men had erected all these defences around the property, and they had made a wall and diverted canals in order to make a moat.

They also had guns, because this wealthy Punjabi man was in the army, and so they barricaded themselves in. Part of the reason for the violence was that there were so many demobilised troops in the area.

Then there was a standoff for three days because the majority of people in the area were Muslims, and they continually tried to attack.

Refugee are seen here at Balloki Kasur during the displacement endemic caused by Partition.

Eventually, those in the haveli just couldn’t hold out any longer and they were brutally murdered – not necessarily with guns, but farming equipment, with machetes, and so on. I’ll leave it to your imaginations. Everybody perished including my great-grandfather and my grandfather’s son.

I don’t know what happened to my grandfather’s wife and I don’t think I’ll ever know. I’m told that she jumped down a well with her daughter, because, in many people’s eyes, that would have been the most honourable death.

But I don’t know.

They said that they kidnapped the young and the beautiful women and she was young and very beautiful.

Women during Partition

I was really struck by the plight of the women during Partition. Women were being raped, murdered, being used as a weapon of war. Women were also abducted, to the point where it is estimated that 75,000 women were kidnapped and kept in other countries.

Those kidnapped women were often converted to a new religion and may have gone on to have their own families, but we just don’t know what happened to them.

There are also plenty of accounts of men and families choosing to kill their own women rather than have them die at the hands of the other. It is unimaginable horror.

This is also not an unusual story. Looking at oral sources, these dark tales emerge again and again.

All these villages had wells, and women, often cradling their children in their arms, chose to jump into a well and attempt to take their own lives.

The problem was that these wells were only so deep. If you’ve got 80 to 120 women in each village trying to kill themselves then not all of them would have died. It was absolute hell on earth.

We can’t even imagine what it must have been like.

Almost 15 million people were displaced and a million people died in the largest mass migration of humans in recorded history. There were both Hindus and Muslims driving for Partition, but the British role was far from exemplary.

This article is an edited transcript of The Partition of India with Anita Rani, available on History Hit TV.

Drawing the line

The man chosen to create the line dividing India and Pakistan was a British civil servant, a British lawyer called Sir Cyril Radcliffe who had been flown out to India.

He’d never been to India before. It was a logistical disaster.

He might have been a lawyer, but he certainly wasn’t a geographer. He had six weeks to draw a line of partition, dividing the vast sub-continent of India into what became India and Pakistan and East Pakistan, which later became Bangladesh. Then, basically, two days later, that was it. The line became reality.

This table was used in the drawing up of the legislation that governed Partition. It is currently located in the Indian Institute of Advanced Studies in Shimla, India. Credit: Nagesh Kamath / Commons

One of the main regions that Partition affected was the northern state of Punjab. Punjab was actually one of the last states to be annexed by the British.

My great-grandfather had decided to up sticks from where his family had lived and go to a region in the Punjab, Montgomery District, for work, because the British were building canals to irrigate the area. He set up a shop and did quite well.

Punjab is the breadbasket of India. It has luscious, fertile land. And the British were in the process of constructing a large canal network which still exists to this day.

Prior to Partition, Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs had all lived side by side as neighbours. A village in the region might be majority-Muslim, say, but it might also be next to a majority-Hindu and Sikh village, with the two only separated by a short distance.

My grandfather would do business with lots of villages around, selling milk and curd. He was a moneylender as well, and he would do business with all of the surrounding villages. They all shared a unified Punjabi culture. They ate the same food. They spoke the same language. Culturally, they were identical.

The only thing that was different about them was the religions that they chose to follow. Everything else was the same. Then, overnight, Muslims were sent one way and Hindus and Sikhs were sent the other.

Absolute chaos ensued and hell broke out. Neighbours were killing neighbours and people were kidnapping other people’s daughters and raping and murdering them.

The inactivity of British troops

It’s a stain on British history as well. It might have been difficult for the British to fully prevent the violence, but they could have taken some action.

The British troops were in their barracks up and down the north-west of the new states of India while this intercommunal violence was going on. They could have intervened and they didn’t.

My grandfather was serving in the south, and he wasn’t even allowed to leave to visit his family in the north. They were dividing up the town where he lived, and his whole family was going to be displaced, and he had to stay at his posting with the British army.

The British cut and run after 200 years of ruling India, and a million people died or, rather, a million Indians died. There were only a handful of British casualties.

Questions could be asked, and should be asked. But that is history.

This article is an edited transcript of The Partition of India with Anita Rani, available on History Hit TV.

The Partition of India in 1947 and the violence that came from it is talked about, but not in any great depth. It involved a division of India, specifically the Punjab and Bengal regions, into India and Pakistan, along primarily religious lines.

It saw Muslims granted their own state in Pakistan, while Hindus and Sikhs residing in Pakistan were forced to leave.

I think I can speak on behalf of the majority of South Asian families who are from the areas that Partition most affected when I say that it’s such a stain on their history that people just don’t talk about it.

There’s an entire generation of people who are, sadly, dying and they have just never spoken about what happened during Partition because it was so brutal.

When I discovered through the Who Do You Think You Are? television programme some of the things that survivors went through, it surprised me less and less that they don’t talk about it.

Those things were simply not discussed. So I was always aware of it, but nobody sat around and talked about it.

Missing documents

Emergency trains crowded with desperate refugees during Partition. Credit: Sridharbsbu / Commons

At a far more banal level, there simply isn’t the same level of documentation on the tragedy as there is on other tragedies. But there is also a tragedy with stories that aren’t from the Western world where there aren’t documents and things don’t tend to be recorded in the same way.

There’s a lot of oral history, but there aren’t as many official files, and what official files do exist often remain classified.

The only reason that we were able to discover so much about my grandfather on Who Do You Think You Are? is because my grandfather was in the British-Indian Army.

That meant there was documentation about where he lived and who he was and details about his family. Otherwise, some things were recorded, but it was really those British Army documents that put the puzzle together and allowed me to find out exactly where his family were at the time of Partition.

Once I’d done the programme, what both struck me and saddened me was how many British-Asian kids were getting in touch to say they had no idea; that they might have “vaguely heard Granny say something”, but that they really didn’t know anything about it.

Or they would say they knew their family had endured Partition, but that nobody had spoken about it. It feels like there was a shroud put over what had taken place and that nobody was allowed to talk about it.

Generational divides

You can see it with my mother. She was really overwhelmed by visiting the house where my grandfather lived, and meeting this guy who knew my grandfather.

My mum’s way of coping with what happened means that she doesn’t have as many questions about Partition and has never had as many questions as me. So while I was able to stand in the house where my grandfather’s first family were killed, I really don’t think my mum could have coped with hearing and seeing that level of detail.

I think it’s a generational thing. That generation are a very stoic generation. It’s the same generation that lived through World War Two. She grew up in India in the 1960s and they didn’t even study Partition in school. For her, all she wanted to know about was her Dad. But for me, it was really important to know the rest.

The reason that the Who Do You Think You Are? programme and things like this podcast are so important, is because nobody has spoken about it.

For the people of that region, it’s our Holocaust.

It’s the stain on the history of India, of Pakistan, of Britain, and in the same moment that all of this horror and murder and chaos was taking place, people were celebrating the birth of a nation, and the independence of another.You end up with a response to the bloodshed that is almost like a collective silence.

How do you begin to confront what you’ve witnessed when it’s something so horrible? How do you start to even begin? Where do you begin to talk about it? I think it does take a generation or two, doesn’t it?