Who made this

Severed was built by Maya Sharma, a high school junior in the United States, as a research project on the long aftermath of the 1947 partition of British India.

Why this project

Partition is most often taught—when it is taught at all—as a story of who moved. The figures cited are refugees, deaths, migrations. The maps in textbooks show arrows: people going west, people going east. But the sites that didn't move—that were left in the wrong country when the line was drawn—tell a different story about what was lost. Twenty-eight of them are on this map.

The project began as an essay for an AP Language class on the long political and cultural effects of partition. It grew, over the summer of 2026, into a full interactive map and four long-form essays.

What this project is

Severed is a static interactive site. The map uses Leaflet with OpenStreetMap and CARTO tiles. The data layer is a single JSON file documenting all twenty-eight sites, their sourcing, their access status, and the project's methodology. Each of the four flagship sites—Kartarpur Sahib, Hinglaj Mata Mandir, Sharada Peeth, and Ajmer Sharif Dargah—has its own long-form page with prose, footnoted sources, and a small image gallery.

Severed is hosted by Thoughtful India.

The project is open about its sources, limits, and the author's own position relative to the material—see the methodology page.

Acknowledgments

This project would not exist without Thoughtful India, which provided the editorial home for it.

The substantial scholarly debt of this project is to the work of historians including Anupama Rao, Vazira Zamindar, Manan Ahmed Asif, and William Dalrymple, whose writing on partition and its aftermath shaped the project's thesis and structure. The journalists Haroon Khalid and Nikhil Mandalaparthy have done some of the most valuable contemporary reporting on the sites this project documents.

Errors that remain are the author's.