For more than 60 years, we shied away from discussions about Partition. The memories of blood and gore overshadowed everything else, and it...
For more than 60 years, we shied away from discussions about Partition. The memories of blood and gore overshadowed everything else, and it was, unsurprisingly, intolerable to confront them.
In August 2011, I made my first Facebook post musing about the difficult time my grandparents must have faced as the nation was celebrating Independence, when they had to flee with their five children (ranging in age from six to 19 with another on the way), to an unfamiliar place to start life anew.
“Oh don’t start that again” said several responses. They implied that to honour the memory of my grandparents’ bravery and calm acceptance would be to provoke trains to fill up with slaughtered people once again, and women to be forced to jump into wells or have their heads chopped off by family members wielding swords.
However, by then there was a rising swell of people who had begun looking at Partition more objectively. By 2017, Partition had begun properly coming out of the closet. It was the 70th anniversary of Indian Independence, and a slew of mainstream Indian publications asked me to write about the insights I’d gained over the course of hundreds of interviews with Sindhis who had experienced Partition, followed by the heroic...
