The 1947 Radcliffe Line: How Bengal Was Split in 48 Days

In August 1947, Cyril Radcliffe, a London lawyer who had never set foot in India, was given five weeks to draw a line that would decide the fate of 400 million people. In this episode, Lucas and Luna explore how the Radcliffe Commission carved Bengal in two — separating villages, families, and rivers without ever visiting the province. They trace the impossible timetable, the pressure from Nehru and Mountbatten, the contested districts of Nadia and Khulna, and the strange irony that Radcliffe destroyed his own maps before flying home. The episode also examines the human cost: the world's largest mass migration, the partition of the Ganges delta's shared waterways, and how one arbitrary line continues to shape the geography of Bangladesh. Drawing on recent scholarship by Joya Chatterji and Willem van Schendel, they ask whether the border was ever really about people or only about politics. This is the untold story of how Bangladesh's western boundary was drawn, almost by accident, in the last breath of the British Raj.

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