The Radcliffe Line: Drawing a Border in Five Weeks

The task of drawing the new borders through Punjab and Bengal fell to Sir Cyril Radcliffe, a British lawyer who had never visited India before July 1947. Chairing two boundary commissions, each with two Congress and two Muslim League nominees who usually deadlocked, he had about five weeks to decide. He worked from outdated maps and census figures, balancing religious majorities by district against 'other factors' such as rivers, railways and irrigation canals.

The award was finished before independence but deliberately published only on 17 August, two days after it, so millions did not know which country they lived in on independence day. The line split communities, farms and canal systems, and placed Sikh holy sites and large Sikh populations on the Pakistani side. Radcliffe destroyed his papers and refused his fee. The border's arbitrariness became a symbol of how decolonization could be rushed and shaped by outsiders.