As fans of the Disney+ series “Ms. Marvel” wait to hear whether there will be a second season, Sahar Arshad is ready to watch the first season again — this time with her grandmother.

The show about a superhero-obsessed Pakistani American teenager shines a spotlight on South Asian heritage, particularly the painful division of the Indian subcontinent 75 years ago into the independent countries of India and Pakistan.

India’s departing British colonial rulers drew borders roughly along religious lines, creating a Hindu-majority India and a Muslim-majority Pakistan. The result was the mass migration of at least 12 million people between the two countries, amid ethnic and religious violence that killed as many as 2 million people.

Among those displaced was Arshad’s grandmother, who went to Pakistan from Hyderabad, India.

“A lot of our grandparents are very strong, strong people, because of the way they’ve rebuilt their lives — for a lot of people from almost nothing,” said Arshad, 20, a university student in Boston who grew up in Karachi, Pakistan. “It’s incredible, but it’s not something that anyone deserves.” 

Experts say the trauma of Partition lingers in those who lived through it and has been passed down to their descendants.

“There wasn’t just the threat of physical violence. They saw physical violence,” said Furrukh Khan, an associate professor of postcolonial studies at Pakistan’s Lahore University of Management Sciences