Ghosts of 1947

I rarely check Facebook. But I had posted my newsletter there and afterward I saw Sumayya’s post. Just like that, I knew what I needed to write.

Partition comes shrouded in fog and fire. We all inherit fragments of it. Some wear it openly; others bury it so deep it takes decades to name. What moved me wasn’t just the trauma in Sumayya’s words but the tenderness: a woman tracing the ghost of her great-aunt, lost in 1947, carried by generational hope.

Partition cannot be wielded to win arguments. It demands silence, humility, horror. The scale of violence was immense. The numbers unknowable but proportions matter. In East Punjab, Delhi, UP, and Bihar, where Muslims were minorities, serious historians estimate they made up 50–60% of all fatalities. In Bihar alone, tens of thousands were killed before Partition formally began.

But the violence went both ways. Sikh and Hindu villages were wiped out in West Punjab and the NWFP. Trains full of corpses ran in both directions. Pain had no monopoly.

Beyond the subcontinent lies an older, wider story of erasure; one in which Muslims, too, were devastated and often forgotten. The Armenian genocide and expulsion of Anatolian Greeks rightly haunt our memory of the Ottoman collapse. But so should the Circassian genocide, in which over 90% of the Circassian people were expelled by the Russian Empire, most perishing or settling in Ottoman lands. In today’s Armenia, especially the former Erivan Khanate, Turkic Muslim communities once formed the majority. Over the 19th century, under Russian and later Armenian control, many were displaced, dispossessed, or killed, often invisibly, as Armenians were resettled from Ottoman and Persian lands.

The pattern held across the Balkans. As the Ottomans retreated, Muslims, Turks, Pomaks, Albanians, were massacred, expelled, or forcibly assimilated. In Greece, especially after the 1923 population exchange, the Muslim presence was all but erased. While some expulsions were formalized, many were preceded by massive ethnic violence. The end of empire meant the catastrophic unhousing of millions of civilian Muslims, left stateless, and voiceless in the record.

Sumayya’s post brought this into focus. Dehumanization doesn’t stop at one event. Whether in Tigray, Gaza, the Rohingya, or Partition, it metastasizes. It hides behind law, civility, policy. But the logic is always the same: they are less.

Islamophobia, like casteism, anti-Blackness, or the erasure of Indigenous or Latino lives, isn’t always loud. Often, it’s quiet. Polite. But no less lethal. It shapes who gets believed. Whose stories get told. Who gets counted.

Trauma has many tones. Some are loud. Others, like her Dadi’s above, stay silent for 70 years. We must learn to hear both. And when we write, or remember, or reflect; let it never come at the cost of someone else’s humanity. That is the line. That is the work.