Introduction to the Sindhi - Partition Foundation

14 August 1947 saw the birth of the new Islamic Republic of Pakistan. At midnight the next day India won its freedom from colonial rule, ending nearly 350 years of British presence in India. The two countries were founded on the basis of religion, with Pakistan as an Islamic state and India as a secular one.

The partition of India left both India and Pakistan devastated. The Partition Holocaust and its aftermath had claimed 3 million lives in the riots. Half a million women were raped or kidnapped. 30 million refugees poured across the borders to regions completely foreign to them, for though they were Hindu, Sikh or Muslim, their identity had been embedded in the regions where their ancestors were from. Not only was the country divided, but so were the provinces of Punjab and Bengal, divisions which caused catastrophic riots and claimed the lives of Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims alike.

The survivors and witnesses of the Partition Holocaust are slowly diminishing in numbers. Each year their recollections become more important, but each year moves them farther away from the original experience. This gives special urgency to the effort to collect as many testimonies as possible - now.

The Partition Foundation has established an archive of written or audiotaped or videotaped testimonies of the survivors. Each testimony is an open-ended, free-flowing interviewing process, discloses expressive details about the day-to-day experience of the survivors with a force that can hardly be exaggerated.

These personal testimonies are crucial documents for the education of students and community groups in an increasingly media-centered era. Each tape is made under the supervision of a professional and supportive team. Cataloged and cross-referenced, the tapes are an important addition to the oral and written history of the period. The Archive stands as a living memorial to counteract forgetfulness, ignorance and malicious denial.