I knew a little about this but didnt realize how many people had died. I knew that Britain had separated India and Pakistan in the 40s and left them as sovereign nations. I guess that all the crap happening after wwII with America, Russia, nukes, etc overshadowed this.

A couple million people is the high estimate of how many folks were killed. There are a few documentaries on YouTube.

The Partition of India was the division of British India in 1947 which created two independent domains, India and Pakistan. It resulted in the dissolution of the British Raj, and the two self-governing countries of Pakistan and India legally came into existence in August of 1947.

The partition displaced 14 million people along religious lines and created a huge refugee crisis. The large scale violence resulted in the estimated deaths between several hundred thousand and two million. There are still shaky relations between India and Pakistan today.

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“Sikhs, Hindus and Muslims in Punjab and Bengal legislative assemblies would meet and vote for partition. If a simple majority of either group wanted partition, then these provinces would be divided.” Muslim demands for a separate state were conceded, Pakistan was created.

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The population of undivided India in 1947 was approx 390 million. After partition, there were 330 million people in India, 30 million in West Pakistan, and 30 million people in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh)."[92] Once the lines were established, about 14.5 million people crossed the borders to what they hoped was the relative safety of religious majority. The 1951 Census of Pakistan identified the number of displaced persons in Pakistan at 7,226,600, presumably all Muslims who had entered Pakistan from India. Similarly, the 1951 Census of India enumerated 7,295,870 displaced persons, apparently all Hindus and Sikhs who had moved to India from Pakistan immediately after the Partition.[2] The two numbers add up to 14.5 million. Since both censuses were held about 3.6 years after the Partition, the enumeration included net population increase after the mass migration.

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“A study of the total population inflows and outflows in the districts of the Punjab, using the data provided by the 1931 and 1951 Census has led to an estimate of 1.26 million missing Muslims who left western India but did not reach Pakistan.[102] The corresponding number of missing Hindus/Sikhs along the western border is estimated to be approximately 0.84 million.[129] This puts the total of missing people, due to Partition-related migration along the Punjab border, to around 2.23 million.[129] Another study of the demographic consequences of partition in the Punjab region using the 1931, 1941 and 1951 censuses concluded that between 2.3 and 3.2 million people went missing in the Punjab”

Violence

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“Bungalows and mansions were burned and looted, women were raped, children were killed in front of their siblings. Trains carrying refugees between the two new nations arrived full of corpses; their passengers had been killed by mobs en route. These were called “blood trains”: “All too often they crossed the border in funereal silence, blood seeping from under their carriage doors,” Hajari wrote in his book.”

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Sudershana Kumari, an 8-year-old Hindu girl who witnessed a massacre in her home town in Pakistan. From the holes in the roof, Kumari saw her uncle and his family being killed by men with spears in the street. Her uncle was a tax collector who had made the error of filling their suitcases with cash — unnecessary weight that had kept his family from running fast enough, Kumari said. “My aunt was wearing white trousers, I remember,” she says. “She was crying, ‘Don’t kill my son, don’t kill my son.’ Then they took her daughter from her. They took her, and they pierced the spear through her body. She died like that, a 1-year-old girl.”
The townspeople were ushered out to a playground, where the previous day’s captives had been doused with oil and burned alive. Corpses lay strewn across the streets. “One dead body here, one dead body there. All people we know,” Kumari said.

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Sarjit Singh Chowdhary, a Sikh soldier who helped Muslim refugees reach safety in Pakistan
“The news reports from his home town disturbed him deeply. “In a village just 12 kilometers from mine called Thoha Khalsa, women drowned themselves to save their honor. When the army found them, their bodies were swollen and had come up to the surface. That was the state at the time. Men were shooting their own wives and daughters because they feared what would happen if they were taken away by attackers,” he said.”

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But outside southern Asia, the brutalities of partition were not widely broadcast. Partly, Hajari says, that may be because of how the events were depicted by British sources. “At the time, there was an impetus to portray the moment of independence as a triumph — that after 200 years of colonial rule, the British could part as friends. If you emphasize the death and violence, that tarnishes the achievement,” he said.