Join us for a series of in-country book talks in India, the United Arab Emirates, and Pakistan

The 1947 Partition of British India remains the largest instance of forced migration in recorded human history. Seventy-five years later, the Partition continues to be central to modern identity in the subcontinent. Etched painfully onto regional consciousness, it influences how many people in postcolonial South Asia envisage their past, present, and future.

In The 1947 Partition of British India: Forced Migration and Its Reverberations, faculty members from Harvard University under the aegis of the Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute, brought together researchers from various disciplines from the three impacted countries — India, Pakistan and Bangladesh — to develop a nuanced understanding of the consequences of Partition and the way it has shaped the fabric of the subcontinent’s demographics, art and architecture, and politics. These discussions will be part of the in-region release of this important work. 

Meet The Book’s Editors

Dr. Jennifer Leaning
Senior Research Fellow at the Harvard FXB Center for Health and Human Rights and retired Professor of the Practice at Harvard T.H Chan School of Public Health

An expert in public health and rights-based responses to humanitarian crises, Dr. Jennifer Leaning has spent her nearly 50-year career at the intersection of war and disaster, atrocities and conflict. Despite witnessing some of the darkest instances of human behavior, it is a ‘kindness of strangers’ motif that motivates her work. She applies this approach to the Mittal Institute’s 1947 Partition Project, which she has led since its inception in 2016.

Shubhangi Bhadada
Mittal Institute Fellow; Program Director, Lancet Citizens’ Commission

Shubhangi Bhadada is the Mittal Institute Fellow at the Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute and manages the Partition Project. She is also the Project Director for the Lancet Citizens’ Commission on Reimagining India’s Health System. She has previously worked at Vidhi Center for Legal Policy, a governance think-tank in New Delhi, L&L Partners, and the International Criminal Tribunal for Former Yugoslavia. She has been a Fellow at the International Human Rights Clinic at Harvard Law School and has consulted with Human Rights Watch and International Corporate Accountability Roundtable. She has a B.A. LLB (Hons.) degree from National Law School of India University, Bangalore, India, BCL from University of Oxford, and an LLM from Harvard Law School with a concentration in international human rights.