The Real History of the Partition in Ms. Marvel

- Kamala Khan is just your average teenage girl until she gets superpowers, which are tied to her complicated family history.

(rays whooshing) - Every Pakistani family has a partition story, (train whistling) (crowd shouting indistinctly) and none of them are good.

- Partition is an event that occurred in 1947, and it happened when colonial Britain left occupied South Asia.

- [Narrator] That's right, the partition in this Marvel show is based on a true historical event that forever changed the continent.

- My history book had just one line and it said that Gandhi led this peaceful march and the British left India in a very sort of bloodless and non-eventful way, and that really clashed with the stories I had heard in my family.

- I was eight years plus when the partition took place.

Nobody imagined that such a Holocaust will take place.

- [Narrator] So what is the real story of the 1947 partition?

Let's get a historian's take on what "Ms. Marvel" tells us about the long lasting impacts of partition, and warning, there will be some spoilers.

- "Ms. Marvel" is a TV show that follows Kamala Khan, who is a Pakistani-American teenager growing up in Jersey City, New Jersey.

She's very much a goofball and a huge fan of anything that has to do with superheroes, specifically "Captain Marvel."

- So there's this thing called Avenger Con, celebrating our great heroes of our time.

- How exactly will you be dressed?

- As Captain Marvel.

- Huh?

- Kamala's power is activated by her bangle, and this bangle has been in her family since at least her great grandmother found it.

Kamala gets her superpowers.

She's trying to learn them.

She's bumbling around, but she's struggling.

There's this moment where she tries to save somebody at the mosque, accidentally breaks his ankle.

She doesn't have the confidence.

She doesn't quite know who she is or why she was given these powers, and it takes Kamala really learning about some of the history behind partition and specifically her family to really, really understand what this history means to her.

- Back then, there was no Pakistan or Bangladesh.

It was all one big country, India.

- And the British left us with a mess.

- [Narrator] So to really dig into Miss Marvel's superpowers, we have to know what happened during the real partition.

- [Narrator] One million people become refugees overnight.

(melancholy music) Pakistan and India each say they are determined to stop the wholesale rioting, but meanwhile, the exodus continues.

- I know growing up in the west, I never heard of partition, and how I was taught about, basically, the end of colonial British rule in South Asia was that it was through a nonviolence movement led by Gandhi.

- What actually happened in 1947 was quite chaotic and devastating.

What the British ended up ultimately deciding to do was to take this entire sub subcontinent, which had more than 500 indigenous kingdoms, and then to re-divide that territory into two countries, India and Pakistan.

- Part of what happened was when colonial Britain was leaving, they brought in someone named Cyril Radcliffe, who had never previously been to South Asia, and then drew lines that cut South Asia into two separate countries.

- And the idea was that Pakistan would be a Muslim nation, and India would be the secular nation.

- [Narrator] Two dominions take shape and begin their separate lives on this memorable day.

(uplifting music) - About 1% of the world's population migrated at the time, and about 14%, one in eight people, were impacted in some way due to partition because of migrants coming into their town or migrants leaving their town, or themselves being migrants.

- [Narrator] As the new dominions of Pakistan and India take over their own affairs, communal hatred flares up in the Punjab.

Fleeing from there looted bloodstain towns comes a new exodus, a million displaced persons.

Independence has not yet brought them peace.

Throughout this vast land, Hindus and Muslims seek safety in new surroundings.

- [Narrator] And you can see the conflicts resulting from partition manifest in "Miss Marvel" when Kamala gets transported back in time.

- The train scene in episode five is very much based on stories from partition and historical facts from partition.

(crowd chattering indistinctly) (migrant speaking foreign language) (migrant foreign language) One of the biggest images from partition is the trains that were leaving both Pakistan to India, and India to Pakistan.

The platforms are crowded full of people, where the trains are so full of people trying to leave that there is all of these people sitting on top and almost tied on top to the train.

- The little girl, Miss Marvel's grandmother, who is lost and crying, so we have a lot of children like that that get separated from their parents.

(child crying) (crowd chattering indistinctly) (man shouting in foreign language) (child crying) (man shouting in foreign language) - [Narrator] Now, going back to Kamala mastering her superpower, how did learning about partition impact her?

- I'm still trying to figure out who I am.

My passport is Pakistani, my roots are in India, and in between all of this, there is a border, there is a border marked with blood and pain.

- The partition in Kamala's family line is a moment in which there's a lot of trauma.

That's the last time that Kamala's grandmother sees her great-grandmother.

Her great-grandmother disappears.

They don't entirely know what happens to her, and so by understanding this history, the way that her family particularly intersects with this history, Kamala is actually able to unlock some of the keys around the generational healing that needs to occur in her maternal family line.

And that's the moment that she really becomes the superhero that she is.

It is the moment for all of us, when we realize that we are important to our family, to our lineages, to our ancestry, and to our culture.

(uplifting music) - I believe it's important to continue to share partition stories in fiction and nonfiction because there's a healing element to it.

So the 1947 partition archive is an attempt to institutionalize the memory of partition.

When we first started around 2009, 2010, this memory was pretty much forgotten.

- On the night of the 14th, my father was glued to the radio.

We got up hearing my father sobbing, and we saw our father's beard had gone half gray.

He couldn't bear the shock.

- Our founding goal at the partition archive was to document at least 10,000 stories, and I'm so happy to say that last year, 2021, we actually reached the goal.

- There was firing.

Who fired?

I don't remember, but there was a lot of bullets flying around, and one of the bullet hit me on my left.

It's still, there's a mark, but luckily it's scraped through.

- They're in the United States now, and a lot of us who are descendants of partition-impacted families, there's a huge number of people specifically from the region of Punjab, which is split between India and Pakistan, and this was the region that was most dramatically impacted by partition violence.

- There was loud voices.

So there I saw thousand of people storming the village and they start killing.

My cousin got shot.

I was very traumatized.

I was standing there not knowing what's happening.

- Mr. Ali Shan was orphaned in 1947.

It took us three visits and three tries before he was able to really open up and talk about this really devastating event.

It's been a really healing element for him to come to terms with this traumatic thing that happened to him.

- Being able to say we know our histories or we're working to know them, we're working to understand them, and we're working to be able to understand these wounds in ourselves and in our people so that we can show up for each other.

That is the world that we want to see.

- Hey, all, I'm Dolly Li, and I'm the director of "Historian's Take," and you just watched the very last episode of our season one.

I know it's heartbreaking, but we'll be back for a season two.

So if you're new to us, make sure you watch the last night episodes where we cover history and pop culture.

And if you've been with us since the very beginning of "Origins," thank you, we love you, we appreciate you.

Make sure you're subscribed to PBS "Origins" on YouTube so you can check out all the new shows that are coming to this channel.

And if you're impatient and need to get your history fix, you can head on over to the PBS YouTube channel for a whole new series called "The Bigger Picture."

It looks at famous photographs and talks about the historical contexts behind them.

So you can tell them "Historian's Take" sent you and we'll see you in season two.

(bouncy music)