How this map was made
Severed is a deliberately limited project, made under stated constraints. This page explains those constraints, the criteria by which sites were included or excluded, the sources relied on, the author's own position relative to the material, and the gaps that remain.
Twenty-eight sites, included if they met four criteria and excluded if any of three rules applied. Sourced from at least two independent references each, prioritizing academic and primary sources where available. I am a high school student writing from outside the wound. Errors are flagged where known and remain mine. Corrections welcome.
What this project is
Severed is an interactive map of twenty-eight sacred sites whose worshipping communities were cut off from access by the 1947 partition of British India, and by the further severances of 1971 and after. It exists to make visible a kind of cultural loss that demographic statistics flatten: the phantom-amputation of religious geographies from religious communities.
The project's underlying argument extends the analytical work of historians like Anupama Rao, Manan Ahmed Asif, and Vazira Zamindar—that partition was not an event in 1947 but a long, ongoing institutional process whose mechanics deserve to be made visible. The map is a starting point for further inquiry, not a definitive resource.
What this project is not
- Not a comprehensive partition history.
- Not an oral history archive. The 1947 Partition Archive does this work at a scale Severed cannot match.
- Not a political document in the partisan sense. It does not assign blame to India or Pakistan as modern states; it engages with the British colonial decisions that produced the conditions, and treats both successor states as inheritors of the same fracture.
- Not a travel guide. Several featured sites are dangerous or inaccessible.
- Not a finished, definitive resource. Limitations are documented openly below.
Inclusion criteria
A site was included only if it met all four of:
- Religious significance: sacred to at least one community with documented pre-1947 presence.
- Severance: partition (1947 or 1971) cut a substantial worshipping community off from access, whether geographically, politically, or practically.
- Verifiability: at least two independent sources, one academic where possible.
- Geographic balance: across the full list, sites are distributed across Punjab, Sindh, Bengal, Kashmir, Balochistan, and the Northwest Frontier—not concentrated in any one region.
Exclusion rules
A site was excluded if:
- Its religious significance was contested in ways the project could not adjudicate honestly.
- Its current status could not be verified with confidence.
- Including it would have required taking a partisan India/Pakistan position the project does not defend.
When in doubt, sites were left out. A tighter, defensible list beats a sprawling list with errors.
Sources
Each site is documented with at least two independent references, listed on the individual site pages. Preference was given to academic sources and primary historical references where available — Al-Biruni's eleventh-century survey, Kalhana's Rajatarangini, the records of the Pakistani Evacuee Trust Property Board, and the published scholarship of historians including Anupama Rao, Vazira Zamindar, Manan Ahmed Asif, and William Dalrymple.
For contemporary access status, news reporting from inside the relevant country was prioritized — Dawn, Tribune India, Scroll, The Wire, Daily Star, Express Tribune — over outside coverage. Where a claim depends on a single source, or where the underlying status may have changed since the project was published, a verification flag is noted on the relevant site page.
A note on the author
I'm Maya Sharma, a rising high school senior in Naperville, Illinois, United States. I am Indian-American and Hindu. I have no immediate family connection to any of the displaced communities documented in this project—I am not Sikh, not Muslim, not Kashmiri Pandit, not Sindhi Hindu, not from a partition-displaced family. I write from outside the wound this project documents.
This means a few things. It means I have approached each site through sources rather than memory. Where I have written about a tradition I do not belong to, I have leaned on sources from inside that tradition—Sikh writers on the Sikh shrines, Pakistani Muslim writers on the Sufi sites, or Kashmiri Pandit advocates on Sharada Peeth, etc. Where I am likely to have gotten the inside view wrong, I have flagged it on the relevant site page. Errors that remain are mine.
I also want to be clear about what this project is not trying to do. It is not making a claim about who has the right to be sad about which site. Partition cut across communities in ways that did not respect the categories the new states later imposed.
Limitations
Geographic asymmetry
Of the twenty-eight sites currently on the map, twenty represent severance from the Indian side to the Pakistani side. This reflects the empirical reality that most religious-site abandonment after 1947 happened to Hindu, Sikh, and Jain communities leaving West Pakistan. But it also reflects gaps in my own access to sources: severed Muslim sites in India and severed Hindu sites in Bangladesh are represented but undercounted relative to their lived significance. Future versions of this project will expand both.
Linguistic limits
I don't read Urdu, Punjabi, Sindhi, Pashto, or Bengali. The project relies on English-language scholarship and translated primary sources throughout. There is significant material in regional languages—particularly the histories maintained by individual communities about their own lost sites—that this project has not yet reached.
Image limits
All forty image slots are filled. Three are used with permission of the photographers (Farooq Soomro / The Karachi Walla, Dr. Tarunjit Singh Butalia / Jeevay Sanjha Punjab, and Shahid Shabbir) outside Wikimedia's free-license system; the rest are from Wikimedia Commons under free licenses.
Temporal limits
Diplomatic relations between India and Pakistan affect access to many of these sites. A site's status as "restricted" or "partial" may have changed by the time you read this. The last-updated date is shown on every page. Updates will be made when the project's status data shifts.
What you can do
I would love to hear from you. If you have corrections, comments, or would just like to connect, please write to me!
Acknowledgments
This project is hosted by Thoughtful India. Thank you very much to Tarunjit Singh Butalia, Farooq Soomro, and Shahid Shabbir for their support and help with image sourcing for the project. Thank you to my English teacher Mr. Rossi for the Inquiry assignment that inspired this project.