Between January and August 1947, the conflicting tensions of British India culminated in the country being partitioned and the creation of two independent new states – the republics of India and Pakistan. Partition of India’s two great provinces of the Punjab and Bengal, forced through in seventy days, led to at least ten million becoming refugees, countless lost their homes and their livelihoods, as the country was dissolved amidst an atmosphere of bloodshed and bitterness. The people who would become some of the most enduring characters of the twentieth century were Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, Winston Churchill, Clement Attlee and the Raj’s last Viceroy, Earl Mountbatten. Their contributions have been praised and damned in equal measure. Yet there is an even bigger, more personal story to tell. Many of those ordinary people who witnessed the events of that years are still alive today. Although most were only children at the time, now, in their late eighties and nineties, they still have a clear recollection of the excitement of independence and the horror of partition. What happened in India that year has created a cycle of revenge that has resonated through the decades and still plagues the subcontinent. The roots of much of today’s violence, both in the region and worldwide, are in the decisions taken that years. This is their story.