The pain of colonization is something that not all of us have been victims of firsthand, but for many of us, we can still hear the echoes of it in the way we hear stories from those dearest to us. We can hear our history in the way our parents reminisce about their homeland, we can taste it in the recipes our mothers hand-fed to us in our youth, and we can feel the strength of our roots in the way we instantly connect with those who share our origins. By elevating the voices of those before us and those fighting alongside us against oppression, we pay homage to our roots and the new beginnings our grandparents, parents, and ourselves fought hard to build.
When I first heard about the British colonization of the subcontinent and the subsequent partition of India and Pakistan, the account didn’t come from my family but rather from a sterile school textbook. At the time, I hadn’t made the realization that the history I was reading was a watered-down version, where the bloody and visceral consequences of imperial subjugation were neatly tucked behind tales of supposed diplomacy.
I’ve been to Pakistan thrice, though I can remember only two of those times. When my grandmother, Hamida Hasan, told me of her experiences as a youth during partition, this distance began to dissolve. Interviewing my grandmother–or Nani, as I call her–made me realize how close the ghosts of partition were to the present realities of many individuals caught amidst violent conflict. Her experience coming to Pakistan four years after partition was the key to a piece of history that shaped my life, but was a stranger to me until now.
“Can you tell me about the partition?” I asked my Nani.
“Pakistan and India were not separated…they were one country, including Bangladesh,” she began. “Quaid-e-Azam, or Mohammed Ali Jinnah, was the founder of Pakistan. India used to be one country, but the British were very clever…[The] East India company slowly gained control over India, and set everyone at war.”
She was describing the mechanics of the rule of the British Raj. Colonization not only depends on physical acts of violence and military force, but also on institutional manipulation that resulted in fractures in local communities.
My Nani’s memory included the symbolic exile of the last Mughal sovereign and the subsequent turmoil caused by the British authorities: “They locked up Bahadur Shah Zafar and slit the throats of his sons…The British took control of everything…They left the dispute of Kashmir…letting the two continue to fight,” my grandmother continued to explain. She crucially noted how the Raj ensured that its departure would leave the people of the subcontinent struggling against each other instead of against the British. By leaving Kashmir as a disputed territory, the British carved out the foundation for what has manifested as intense Pakistani and Indian nationalism and territorial conflicts today.
Eager to understand how the larger geopolitical divisions impacted individuals, I asked about her family and details of her life from when she first came to Pakistan:
“I was very young…I was 6 years old. Partition ended in 1947, but we came in 1951. At that time, we had received our visa. We came four years after Partition. My older sister was sixteen. The Hindus and Sikhs that came, they would capture girls and take them away from their homes, kill the parents, and rape [the girls] in front of everyone. My father, out of fear, got my sister married. If Pakistan hadn’t been made, they wouldn’t have had to get her married then,” she explained solemnly.
Her recollection underscores a brutal reality: women’s bodies were objectified by both sides into tools for political gain. The threat of gendered violence fundamentally restructured families, forcing girls into marriage in the name of “protection.”
To escape this volatile landscape, survival demanded strategic subversion. Nani recounted how her uncle managed to sneak her and her family across the new border:
“My uncle got a visa from Pakistan and said that he was going to go get his wife and kids. Our mother was his ‘wife,’ and we were his ‘kids.’ We came with our uncle. Our father could not come at the time. He came later and snuck in at night”
I hesitated to ask her the next of my burning questions, but I couldn’t help but speculate about the violence that took place in the region during those years:
“They would come at night and…say, ‘Go, get out, we’re going to kill you!’ They would take their things and set fires to the houses. They would capture and take girls.”
My Nani’s experiences taught me that the pursuit of knowledge must always begin at home. As global cycles of colonization, imperialism, genocide, and structural violence continue to devastate communities worldwide, digging into our personal histories becomes a radical act. It equips us with a sharper, more empathetic lens through which to view modern atrocities.
It is vital to guard and articulate our histories, particularly when living in Western spaces that frequently ignore, water down, and defend historic perpetrators of imperial violence. As a Pakistani Muslim woman living in the United States, interviewing my grandmother removed the illusion of historical distance. It made me acutely aware that the privileges that I enjoy today were paid for in the currency of my family’s displacement and sacrifice. We owe it to those who came before us to remember their experiences and dismantle the lines of separation that continue to divide us today.