Conclusion

<p dir="ltr">Conclusion to the book: Borders and Mobility in South Asia and Beyond</p><p dir="ltr">The partition of British India illustrates how the decisions of a few people over a very short period of time can have lasting impacts on the lives of billions of others for many generations. The momentous and calamitous event was enacted within a two-month period in the summer of 1947 and relied heavily on the judgement of a single man, Sir Cyril Radcliffe, who had never even visited India prior to his appointment as the head of the Boundary Commission that would decide the permanent borders for India, Pakistan, and eventually Bangladesh (Chatterji 1999). To perform this mammoth task, the commission had only six weeks and Radcliffe started drawing the line on the map without any empirical knowledge of the people living along that borderscape (van Schendel 2005; Whyte 2002) (cont.)</p>