About the atlas

Every map has its own page. Hover over a district or circle, or tap it on a phone, to see the row behind it: the date, place, perpetrator, toll and source of an attack, or the population and origin of a district. Below each map is the full list, which you can sort and search. The sources for each map are listed on its page.

Sources first

Each map starts from a primary or near-primary source: Census of India 1941 and 1951 volumes, the Census of Pakistan 1951 and the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics 2023 tables, the South Asia Terrorism Portal’s major incident lists, the Uppsala Conflict Data Program’s event data, and ISPR statements. Gaps are filled from Wikipedia and news reports, and every added row is marked as such in the data.

Counting attacks

• Deaths are victims killed, civilians and security forces together, not counting the attackers.
• Security-force operations, riots, clashes between two armed groups and cross-border shelling by a state army are left out. The army operations map and the Saudi map are the exceptions, because those are their subjects.
• Reports of one attack within four days in the same district are merged, keeping the highest toll. Final official tolls are used where they are well established.
• Each attack is placed at its named village or town where GeoNames has a match inside the stated district, otherwise at the district’s interior point.
• Circle area is people killed, at a radius of 4.37 × √deaths, on every death-sized map, so Pakistan, India and Afghanistan compare directly.

Counting people

• Hindu includes Scheduled Castes. “Others” in the 1941 Jammu and Kashmir census are almost all Buddhists.
• Areas with no residents, Aksai Chin and Shaksgam, follow the 1941 unit they belonged to.
• Where a modern district boundary splits a 1941 tehsil, the tehsil is shared out by rough population, so district figures are estimates.

Drawing

Maps are rendered in Python with shapely and geopandas, then written out as hand-built SVG at a 3200 × 2000 view box and exported to PNG 1920 pixels wide, with the credit band below. The British India base map keeps its natural 2400 × 2235 size and a Lambert conformal conic projection. Boundaries come from geoBoundaries and Natural Earth, and place names from GeoNames.

Borders

The partition and Kashmir maps draw hypothetical borders from census majorities. They are for discussion and are not endorsements of any claim.

Using the maps

The maps are free to reuse, including commercially, with credit. See Licence and credit for the wording to use.