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Written by the Remaking Britain team. First published December 2025.

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India’s independence in 1947 was accompanied by its division into West and East Pakistan (for Muslims) and India (for Hindus and Sikhs). The new borders, drawn by British lawyer Cyril Radcliffe in just six weeks, divided families, villages and cities, and led to widespread violence as well as mass displacement as millions of Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs were uprooted from their homes. In 1971, West Pakistan and East Pakistan went to war, resulting in East Pakistan gaining its independence as Bangladesh. Both of these events contributed to a long history of migration from South Asia to the UK, which dates back to the early 17th century. By the 1830s, South Asians in Britain included students, ayahs (or nannies) and sailors, among others. While some returned to India, many remained and established communities, especially in Britain’s port cities. After the Second World War, South Asians began to arrive and settle in Britain in larger numbers, encouraged by the British Nationality Act of 1948 which granted them Commonwealth citizenship. Events including the 1967 construction of the Mangla Dam in Mirpur, Pakistan, and the Ugandan Expulsion Order of 1972, led to more waves of migration. Targeted by immigration legislation, which dates back to the early 20th century, South Asian communities nevertheless flourished across the UK. Partition has shaped the histories of most British South Asian families today. Its legacies can be felt in tensions within communities, trauma within families, stories passed through generations, and the creative production of writers and artists.

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Partitioning India

The first partition of India, championed by Viceroy Lord Curzon, took place in 1905 when the Bengal Presidency was divided into Muslim-majority East Bengal and Hindu-majority West Bengal. The division was an attempt to curb the nationalist movement that was flourishing there. It was met with widespread resistance across India, and led to the Swadeshi Movement which boycotted British goods and mobilised for political self-determination.

While resistance led to the reunification of Bengal in 1911, India was split into two nations when it gained independence in 1947 following the Second World War which contributed to Britain’s weakening as a colonial power. The Partition of India, which cut across both Bengal and Punjab, took place in August 1947: Pakistan became an independent nation on 14 August and India gained its freedom the following day. In London, Indians gathered at India House, Aldwych, to salute the flag of a newly independent India, while Pakistanis gathered in celebration at Lancaster House. Habib Ibrahim Rahimtoola was appointed the first High Commissioner for Pakistan and V K Krishna Menon for India.

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Held by British Library. Shelfmark: IOR/L/PJ/5/396/2. Crown Copyright: This material has been published under an Open Government Licence. 

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Partition boundary map: Bengal and Assam, 1947

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Partition boundary map: Bengal and Assam, 1947

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In the years leading up to independence, Menon had been the driving force behind the Britain-based India League, which campaigned tirelessly for an independent India, raising consciousness among the British and lobbying MPs. Yet, independence and Partition were accompanied by horrific inter-communal violence. Rapidly implemented by British Viceroy Lord Mountbatten and Sir Cyril Radcliffe, Partition led to the displacement of between 12 and 20 million people and the death of between one and two million people as they tried to cross the borders – with Hindus and Sikhs travelling from West or East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) to India, and Muslims from India to West or East Pakistan. The separation of West and East Pakistan by around 1,000 miles, the cultural and linguistic differences between the two regions, and the location of power in West Pakistan led to tensions which culminated in the Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971. In December of that year, Bangladesh successfully gained its independence from Pakistan. The 1947 Partition also sparked a dispute between India and Pakistan over the territory of Kashmir, which has led to multiple wars and ongoing conflict in the region.

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Held by British Library. Shelfmark: IOR/L/I/1/1425.

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Inward Telegram to Commonwealth Relations Office from the UK High Commissioner in Pakistan, 1948

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Inward Telegram to Commonwealth Relations Office from the UK High Commissioner in Pakistan, 1948

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Crown Copyright: This material has been published under an Open Government Licence.

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South Asian migration to Britain

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Held by British Library. Shelfmark: C456/40. © British Library

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Gilli Salvat talking about arriving in the UK from India in 1948, shortly after Partition (recorded 1986)

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Gilli Salvat talking about arriving in the UK from India in 1948, shortly after Partition (recorded 1986)

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The communal violence that took place in 1947, and the displacement of and trauma experienced by millions of people, led to some deciding to leave India or the newly formed Pakistan for a life in Britain. But South Asian migration to Britain goes back much further than this, to at least 1614. By the 1830s a diverse range of South Asians were beginning to move to the United Kingdom. Some came as students, enrolling at universities and often returning to India after completing their studies. Others came as ayahs (nannies) accompanying British families on their seasonal visits from India only to be abandoned and left to fend for themselves; or as lascars (sailors), some of whom ‘jumped ship’ because of poor pay and working conditions and settled in port cities including Cardiff, Liverpool, Glasgow and London.

As Indian communities began to develop, so too did legislation restricting the settlement of newcomers from South Asia as well as other British colonies. 1919 saw outbreaks of rioting, whereby white people targeted racially minoritised workers in Britain’s major seaports in the context of widespread unemployment following the First World War. In the same year, the Aliens Restriction Act extended the powers of the wartime Aliens Restriction Act 1914 which targeted ‘enemy aliens’ resident in Britain. It stipulated that foreign nationals should register with the police, enabled their deportation, restricted where they could live and work, and made it illegal for them to promote industrial action. An amendment the following year, in the 1920 Aliens Order, required all ‘aliens’ seeking housing or employment to register with the police to avoid deportation. While South Asians were not ‘aliens’ but British subjects, many were targeted and harassed because of this legislation, including seamen who did not have passports so could not prove their status. The Special Restriction (Coloured Alien Seamen) Order of 1925 explicitly racialised the legislation, requiring 'coloured' seamen who did not possess documentary proof of their status as British to register as ‘aliens’. Enforced rigidly by state officials, the law led to the wrongful deportation of numerous Indian, Black and Chinese men, not all of them seamen. It was revoked in 1942 following protest including by the Indian Seamen’s Union.

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Held by British Library. Shelfmark: IOR/L/E/9/953.

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Letter from Mary Fazel to the India Office regarding her husband's passport and India Office reply, 1926

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Letter from Mary Fazel to the India Office regarding her husband's passport and India Office reply, 1926

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Crown Copyright: This material has been published under an Open Government Licence.

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After the Second World War, independence and Partition, larger numbers of South Asians began to migrate to the UK, encouraged by the British Nationality Act of 1948 which granted citizenship to all Commonwealth members in response to post-war labour shortages. The first wave of post-war migrants were mainly men, many of them from rural Punjab. They settled in industrial areas including Birmingham, Manchester, Bradford and parts of London, where they found work in textiles, manufacturing and the services sector, frequently encountering racism and discrimination in the workplace as well as on the streets. In 1967, the construction of the Mangla Dam in Mirpur, Pakistan, led to the displacement of around 100,000 people, precipitating a large wave of migration and settlement in the industrial towns and cities of the Midlands and Yorkshire among other places. In the same decade, ‘Africanization’ policies in newly independent East African nations, including Kenya and Tanzania, discriminated against their large South Asian populations, driving them out. The most extreme example of this was in Uganda where the Expulsion Order of 1972 gave South Asians just 90 days to leave the country. As British passport holders, many East African Asians fled to the UK where they were often faced with hostility and more discrimination.

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Held by National Archives. Home Office Collection HO 289 73. Courtesy of the National Archives Image Library. Crown Copyright: This material has been published under an Open Government Licence.

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A list of 'Red Areas' (places where Ugandan Asians were discouraged from resettling) produced by the Home Office, 1972

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A list of 'Red Areas' (places where Ugandan Asians were discouraged from resettling) produced by the Home Office, 1972

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In the 1960s, the rise of far-right politics, exemplified by Conservative MP Enoch Powell and his infamous 1968 ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, led to increased hostility towards South Asians, including in the form of violent attacks. South Asian migrants also faced discrimination as a result of immigration legislation of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. The first of these, the Commonwealth Immigration Act of 1962, graded prospective migrants according to their employment prospects, while its amendment in 1968 extended these restrictions by limiting the right of entry to those who were born in Britain and their children and grandchildren. Further acts followed in 1971 and 1988, and, while none mentioned race explicitly, they all targeted racialised British Commonwealth citizens disproportionately. Discriminatory measures also took place at Britain’s border: for example, in the 1970s, women arriving as fiancés to South Asian British men were subjected to virginity testing at Heathrow Airport.

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Legacies of Partition

Many South Asian migrants to Britain experienced the Partition of India either firsthand or through their parents, and almost all British South Asian family histories have been shaped by those events of 1947. Just as Partition led, either directly or indirectly, to some migration to Britain, so too did the Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971. While the majority of Bangladeshis fleeing the conflict sought refuge in India, some joined their relatives in east London or elsewhere in Britain. Before the outbreak of war, British Bengali communities came together to mobilise for an independent Bangladesh. In London, members of the Bangladesh Liberation Movement marched to the Pakistan High Commission and Hyde Park, declaring 23 March 'Resistance Day'; while the Bangladesh Women's Association galvanised grass-roots activism among Bengali women. In Birmingham, the East Pakistan Liberation Front was formed and took similar action. A UK branch of the Awami League raised funds and ferried Bengalis from Bradford to join demonstrations in London. Some members of the Bengali diaspora in Britain decided to return to the subcontinent to fight in the war.

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Held by British Library. Shelfmark: C2047. © Remaking Britain. Image credit: Photo by M. Parmar.

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Krishan Hansrani talking about the Bangladesh Liberation War and its impact in Leicester (recorded 2024)

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Krishan Hansrani talking about the Bangladesh Liberation War and its impact in Leicester (recorded 2024)

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The 1971 conflict between East and West Pakistan led to hostility between Pakistani and Bangladeshi communities in Britain, and even outbreaks of violence. The 1947 Partition of India and Pakistan and the subsequent disputes – for control of Kashmir, over nuclear dominance, about religious beliefs and sites – has also seeded divisions and hostilities among South Asian communities in the UK. In fact, many British Asian family histories straddle the boundaries between the three nations in complicated ways, calling these divisions into question. Contemporary British Asian writers Moniza Alvi (At the Time of Partition) and Sabba Khan (The Roles We Play) have explored the legacies of Partition, including its impact on identity, while Tara Theatre has captured the testimonies of British Partition survivors in the play Silence, adapted from Kavita Puri’s 2019 book Partition Voices: Untold British Stories. These creative works, as well as Puri’s BBC Radio 4 series Partition Voices (2017) and Inheritors of Partition (2022), have helped to fill the silences of the decades following 1947 and to highlight the importance of teaching the history of Partition in Britain, as part of British history.

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Private collection. Image credit:© Sabba Khan from The Roles We Play (Myriad, 2021). Except as otherwise permitted by your national copyright laws this material may not be copied or distributed further.

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The text in this article is available under a Creative Commons License.

Credit: Remaking Britain team (Rehana Ahmed, Aleena Din, Sumita Mukherjee, Susheila Nasta, Maya Parmar, Florian Stadtler, Rozina Visram).

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