In August 1947, the British lawyer Cyril Radcliffe drew a line across a map of India. He had never been to the subcontinent before. He had five weeks to complete his work. The line he drew — separating the new nations of India and Pakistan — cut through villages, through families, through the bodies of millions who had no idea, in the summer of 1947, that the street they lived on was about to become a border.
Fifteen million people crossed that line in both directions. Between one and two million died. Tens of thousands of women were abducted, raped, forcibly converted, and sometimes "recovered" by armies that treated them as property to be returned to the rightful side. It was, in every meaningful sense, a catastrophe — one of the largest and most violent mass displacements in human history.
And yet, for the first twenty-five years after 1947, Indian and Pakistani cinema barely mentioned it.