The Great Migration India Pakistan 1947 Life Magazine Margaret Bourke-White Sunil Janah Photojournalism Photography

India-Pakistan partition violence, 1946

In 1946 Life sent Bourke-White to India to cover the emergence of that country's independence from Great Britain. Her photo-essay, The Caste System, shows children working under dire conditions in factories, most vulnerable to its discriminatory practices. She also photographed the Great Migration of refugees forced to leave their homes after the partitioning of Pakistan had created new borders. Bourke-White photographed Mohandas K. Gandhi just hours before he was assassinated and said of that incident, "Nothing in all my life has affected me more deeply and the memory will never leave me." Her picture of Gandhi, clothed simply and observing a day of silence by his spinning wheel has become an iconic image.

The same year she photo graphed Pakistan's founder Muhammed Ali Jinnah. Bourke-White's work took her into the seat of some of the worst violence that this region of the world has ever witnessed. Riots in Kolkata (formerly Calcutta) had left rotting corpses in the street. As a way to digest the horror she witnessed in India Bourke-White again produced a book, this one called, Halfway to Freedom. Biographers and art critics have said that some of her most beautiful and dramatic work is from that period. See for Sunil Janah: Photographing India, 1942-1978 ...