The Stories We Inherit: How the Partition of India Still Shapes South Asian Mental Health
I grew up knowing that all four of my grandparents migrated from India to Pakistan around the Partition of 1947. I thought I knew my family’s Partition story. As I got older, I realized I didn’t. I only knew pieces of it.
Some of my most endearing childhood memories are of sitting at the feet of my Dadi, my paternal grandmother, while she oiled my hair—a tradition passed through generations of South Asian families. As she poured cool amla oil onto my scalp and worked it through my hair, she would tell us stories.
One was about leaving Uttar Pradesh, India, around Partition. She traveled to Pakistan with her parents and siblings by caravan.
“Bohat mushkil tha.” It was really hard.
She didn’t say much more.
It wasn’t until later that I began learning about my other grandparents’ journeys. Some came by train. Others by plane. Throughout my life, I kept stumbling upon pieces: something mentioned by an aunt, a story shared by a cousin, a detail I had never heard before.
I’m realizing now that family history often reaches us this way—not as a complete story, but in fragments.
What Was the Partition of India, and Why Does It Still Matter for South Asian Mental Health?
The British rule began with the East India Company, which began collecting taxes in India and used a portion of those revenues to fund purchasing of Indian goods for British Use, essentially buying Indian goods from Indian traders with money that was acquired from them. British colonial rule of the Indian subcontinent is full of stories of control, exploitation, and famine. Some South Asians benefited from Britain's rule but the majority suffered and we continue to see the remnants of this suffering across that region. Research shows that Britain drained an estimated 45 trillion dollars from India leaving the region impoverished.
After losses in WWII, in 1947 the nearly two century long British rule of India came to an end, dividing the region primarily along religious lines into Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan, which at the time included present-day Bangladesh.
Partition was not simply a political event. It resulted in one of the largest mass migrations in modern history. Shashkevich (2019) reports that approximately 15 million people moved or were forced to move during Partition, with estimates of deaths ranging from 500,000 to 2 million. Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs crossed newly created borders during a time marked by widespread violence, displacement, family separation, sexual violence, and the loss of homes, land, and communities. Stories are told of neighbors and life long friends losing trust and turning on one another overnight, bloodied trains full of refugees and migrant bodies on both sides of the border, villages being burned, women being abducted, and children going missing.
This trauma didn’t end in 1947. It lives on in silence and behaviors we see today.
What Is Intergenerational Trauma?
Intergenerational trauma refers to ways the impact of trauma can continue from one generation to the next through family relationships, modeled coping strategies, beliefs, social environments, and potentially biological processes being studied through epigenetics.
In Break the Cycle, psychologist Dr. Mariel Buqué (2024) describes intergenerational trauma through both biological and psychological pathways. These include family relationships, parenting and attachment, learned beliefs and coping strategies, social and cultural conditions, and emerging research into biological mechanisms such as epigenetics. She also emphasizes that behaviors we might now recognize as trauma responses may once have served an adaptive purpose: helping a person, family, or community survive.
The goal isn't to look backward and diagnose our ancestors. It's to become curious about which survival strategies may still be operating long after the original threat has passed.
How Can Historical Trauma Show Up in South Asian Families Today?
Historical Trauma, like that of Partition, does not look the same in every South Asian family. South Asians are not a monolith. Thousands of distinct ethnic communities and hundreds of languages exist across South Asia. People don’t respond to crises the same way. Their responses can differ based on various factors including: gender identity, class, faith, religious identity, past trauma, migration history, proximity to violence, geography, political context, etc.
At the same time, there are patterns and survival strategies that some South Asian readers may recognize in their families today.
Maybe this sounds familiar:
Statements like “Don’t waste food.” or “Family comes first.”
Difficulty resting without guilt.
Feeling responsible for everyone.
Being highly successful but always preparing for something to go wrong.
Men being taught to provide and solve problems but not necessarily how to be vulnerable.
Daughters becoming mediators, translators, caretakers, or emotional anchors.
Noticing these patterns can help provide context to your reality today. It's not about blaming our families or claiming that every South Asian family pattern came from Partition. Instead, we can ask: Where might this have come from? What purpose did it serve? Does it still protect us now? Or has it become exhausting to carry?
You can understand why a pattern developed and provide context for your experiences today.
Why Did So Many Families Stay Silent About Partition?
For many Partition survivors, there often wasn’t time, safety, or space to process what they went through while rebuilding their lives. When we factor in additional layers of privacy, grief, and lack of language for trauma, this silence begins to make sense. For some families, silence itself became part of what was passed down.
Amrita Uttamchandani (2011) theorized three modes of intergenerational transmission related to Partition. One that resonates with both my personal and clinical experience is what she called “the cycle of selective silence.”
Earlier this year, I interviewed one of the eldest members of my family, a Partition survivor. When I first opened the conversation, she quickly told me, “I don't have much to share. We were fine.” As I continued asking questions—perhaps helped by my therapist instincts—she ended up talking with me for two hours about our family's story.
Uttamchandani describes a pattern in which younger family members ask survivors about Partition and may receive facts, emotional discomfort, discouragement, or messages about the need to “move on.” Over time, descendants may become hesitant to ask, leaving the emotional dimensions of Partition largely unspoken.
In my clinical work, I often see how family norms around privacy and emotional restraint can shape communication across generations. How many of us have heard something like “ghar ki baat ghar mein rakhni chahiye”—what happens at home should stay at home?
Privacy itself isn't unhealthy. It can protect families and relationships. But when privacy becomes silence around emotional pain, people may feel unable to seek support—from relatives, community members, or mental health professionals.
Buqué (2024) talks about how intergenerational loyalty can lead to family secrecy. When privacy becomes connected to shame or fear of judgement, it can make it harder to question patterns that contribute to anxiety, perfectionism, people-pleasing, or burnout.
Even when stories aren't spoken, their impact can still shape how families respond to stress, safety, and uncertainty. It can also show up in everyday beliefs and in our connection to others.
Can Talking About Family History Help Heal Intergenerational Trauma?
Many South Asians believe that bringing up memories from Partition isn't valuable. Yet, South Asian cultures have rich traditions of oral storytelling, poetry, music, religious narratives, and family histories passed from one generation to another. Family storytelling allows us to build context, meaning, connection and compassion around experiences that were previously fragmented.
There is a caveat. Healing conversations like this require discernment, emotional safety and respect for each person's readiness and boundaries.
Buqué (2024) emphasizes that difficult intergenerational conversations work best when people avoid blame, keep messages manageable, notice nervous-system activation, and accept that not every family member will be willing or able to participate.
You can begin your own journey of intergenerational storytelling by:
Interviewing an elder or relative—with their consent.
Privately recording or writing down family stories.
Preserving names, places, photographs, recipes, or other meaningful memories.
Asking about resilience and joy, not only trauma.
Journaling about what you discover.
Talking with siblings, cousins, or other relatives.
Exploring what comes up for you in therapy.
Not everyone will be ready to talk and some people may not have elders to ask. If your elders are no longer living, unwilling to talk, or you have very little information, you can still explore the patterns, beliefs, values, and unanswered questions that you do have access to.
And remember, healing does not require publicly sharing private family stories.
Do We Inherit Resilience Alongside Trauma?
Yes. Trauma isn’t the only thing passed down. Families can also pass forward resourcefulness, faith, community, resistance, cultural practices, humor, and ways of rebuilding. Our communities have sources of incredible resilience. One memorable part of hearing my family's history was learning about the ways previous generations resisted British colonial influence. These stories reminded me that what gets passed down isn't only fear or pain. Families also pass down resistance, resourcefulness, faith, cultural practices, humor, community, and ways of rebuilding.
Sometimes resilience looks extraordinary. Sometimes it looks ordinary: preserving a family recipe, maintaining a religious practice, speaking a language across generations, rebuilding a livelihood, or telling a child where their family came from. This is a reality many of us can relate to even today.
South Asian history is full of stories of resilience: ancestors who crossed rivers, farmland, borders, and seas to rebuild; families who preserved recipes and traditions across displacement; and elders who passed down stories that were often absent from the history curricula many of us encountered growing up.
But honoring resilience does not mean romanticizing the conditions that required it.
Intergenerational trauma asks, What did people endure?
Intergenerational resilience asks, How did they survive and rebuild?
A social justice lens asks another question: Why were people required to endure these conditions in the first place?
We can honor survival without turning suffering into an inspirational story.
How Can I Explore My Own Family’s Intergenerational Patterns?
Learning about the patterns that are passed down through our lineage begins with curiosity. It’s not about proving that a pattern has origins in the struggles of a specific ancestor or historical event. It's about noticing which family narratives and survival skills get repeated through your family and affect you today.
A great place to start is asking yourself questions like the following:
What stories are repeated in my family?
What subjects are avoided?
What migrations, losses, separations, or periods of instability occurred?
How did my family define safety and being “settled”?
What did they believe made someone “strong”?
What roles did sons and daughters inherit?
How did faith or community help people cope?
Which family patterns still help me?
Which ones feel exhausting now?
If you're ready to explore further, you might:
Ask a trusted elder or relative about one meaningful family memory.
Preserve stories through writing, audio recordings (with permission), photographs, recipes, or a family tree.
Notice what comes up emotionally as you learn—and give yourself permission to stop when you need to.
These ways of exploring generational patterns will help you preserve your family’s history long after memories begin to fade.
What Does Healing Intergenerational Trauma Look Like?
Healing intergenerational trauma as a South Asian requires a process of reclamation. For South Asians in the diaspora, that may include learning histories that were largely absent from the classrooms we grew up in. It can mean naming experiences our families rarely named, becoming curious about survival patterns, and understanding ourselves within a larger cultural and historical context.
Healing can also look very practical: noticing how you respond during conflict, learning to regulate your nervous system, developing healthier communication and boundaries, making room for grief, reconnecting with meaningful cultural or spiritual practices, and deciding intentionally what you want to carry forward.
Healing is not about never being triggered again. It is about having more choices in how you respond when you are.
Work With a South Asian & Muslim Therapist in Texas
Maybe you are able to see the generational patterns that exist within your family, and you feel exhausted by carrying them. Maybe you are the daughter everyone relies on, the son who is trying to hold it together while feeling like you have hit your limit, the high achiever who struggles to relax, or the person who wants to build healthier connections while holding on to values in your culture or faith.
It is possible to hold respect for what your previous generations survived, to honor their sacrifices and care, AND want something different for yourself.
I provide culturally affirming telehealth therapy for South Asian, SWANA, and Muslim adults and families across Texas who are navigating anxiety, perfectionism, family pressure, relationship difficulties, intergenerational trauma, identity, grief, and the emotional impact of migration and discrimination.
Therapy can offer a space to understand the survival patterns underneath painful family dynamics without asking you to reject your family, culture, or faith. Together, we can work toward giving you more choices—choices grounded in your values rather than fear, guilt, or survival.
FAQ: The Short & Sweet
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FAQ: The Short & Sweet ~
FAQ: Partition, Intergenerational Trauma & South Asian Mental Health
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Intergenerational trauma describes how the effects of trauma can continue from one generation to the next. This can happen through family relationships, parenting, learned beliefs and coping strategies, social and cultural environments, and potentially biological processes being studied through epigenetics.
Understanding intergenerational trauma isn't about blaming previous generations. It can help us become curious about survival strategies that once protected our families but may no longer serve us today.
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Yes, the effects of the 1947 Partition of India can continue to shape some South Asian families through stories, silences, migration experiences, beliefs about safety, and patterns of coping with stress. However, South Asians are not a monolith, and not every family pattern or mental health concern can—or should—be attributed to Partition.
Understanding historical context can help us ask a more useful question: What did our families learn to do in order to survive, and what might they have carried forward?
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Intergenerational trauma can look different in every family. Some people may recognize patterns such as anxiety, perfectionism, difficulty resting, people-pleasing, emotional suppression, family secrecy, fear of instability, or feeling responsible for other family members.
For example, you may be the daughter everyone depends on, the son who learned to provide but struggles to be vulnerable, or the high achiever who feels guilty slowing down. Recognizing these patterns doesn't prove where they came from, but it can give you a place to begin exploring them with curiosity.
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Families may remain silent about painful experiences for many reasons, including grief, privacy, protection of younger generations, cultural expectations, or simply needing to focus on rebuilding and surviving. Sometimes the message becomes: we survived it, so why talk about it?
Privacy itself isn't unhealthy. But when family silence makes it difficult to talk about emotional pain or seek support, patterns can continue without anyone having language for what is happening.
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Yes. You do not need a complete family history—or access to living elders—to begin exploring intergenerational patterns. Some people inherit detailed stories, while others inherit fragments, silence, conflicting memories, or unanswered questions.
You can begin with what you do know: the roles people play in your family, recurring beliefs about safety or success, patterns during conflict, cultural and spiritual practices, and the behaviors that help or exhaust you today. Healing does not require publicly sharing private family stories.
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Therapy can help you explore family and survival patterns, regulate stress responses, process grief, strengthen communication and boundaries, and decide what you want to carry forward. Culturally affirming therapy can make room for family, culture, faith, migration, racism, Islamophobia, and other parts of your identity rather than treating them as separate from your mental health.
I provide virtual therapy for South Asian, SWANA, and Muslim adults and families across Texas navigating anxiety, perfectionism, family pressure, relationship difficulties, identity, grief, and intergenerational patterns.
If you're looking for a therapist who understands these intersections, schedule a free 15-minute consultation to explore whether we might be a good fit.
References:
Buqué, M. (2024). Break the cycle: A guide to healing intergenerational trauma. Dutton.
Shashkevich, A. (2019, March 8). Stanford scholar explains the history of India’s partition, its ongoing effects today. Stanford Report. https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2019/03/partition-1947-continues-haunt-india-pakistan-stanford-scholar-says
Uttamchandani, A. M. (2011). Crossing borders and generations: Sharing of Partition stories among survivors and families of the Partition of British India [Doctoral dissertation, The Chicago School of Professional Psychology].