ABSTRACT
The Partition of India into two independent sovereign states had been agreed. Mostly the boundaries of the successor states could be defined by using the boundaries of the provinces or Princely States which acceded to them – in the lower Indus valley Sind, Khairpur and Bahawalpur went to Pakistan and the boundary was fairly easily drawn. But two provinces were to be partitioned – Bengal and Punjab. To those who know the continuity of culture and language in the two parts of Bengal and Punjab, the idea of a partition to separate religious communities seems destructive and almost pointless, except that the violence the communities could inflict on each other in their moments of passion had been displayed too often for it to be ignored. So in Punjab and Bengal new lines had to be drawn – lines which would appear on the map of boundary frequencies, in a sense the basic map around which this book is written (Figure F.1), for the very first time. For the first time in South Asia’s history the principle of identitive integration at the mass level was being applied, and it produced new lines which utilitarian and coercive integration had never done before. Someone had to be responsible for these new lines.
