In the violence of 1947 tens of thousands of women were abducted on both sides. In December 1947 India and Pakistan agreed to recover and exchange them, and the Abducted Persons Recovery and Restoration Act followed in 1949.
The operation ran for about nine years. Around 30,000 women were recovered in total across both countries, the figures usually given as roughly 22,000 Muslim women recovered in India and 8,000 Hindu and Sikh women in Pakistan.
Many did not want to go. Some had been years in their new households, had children, and knew their birth families would not take them back. Their consent was not a legal requirement under the Act. Social workers on both sides recorded women being removed a second time, by the state.
Mridula Sarabhai and Kamlaben Patel ran much of the Indian side and both wrote about it afterward with considerable discomfort.
This is the part of 1947 that is least in the public accounts and most in the fiction, in Amrita Pritam's Pinjar and in Rajinder Singh Bedi's Lajwanti, because the fiction could say what the reports could not.
Both governments agreed in 1947 and 1948 to recover women abducted during the movement and return them, and a formal operation ran for years under legislation on both sides.
Around thirty thousand women were recovered in total across both directions. Many did not want to go, having made lives where they were, and the law gave them no say.
The operation is the least discussed part of 1947 and it is the part that most directly involved the state in deciding what happened to individual women.