A gendered telling of Partition
7 months, 1 week ago

A gendered telling of Partition

Hindustan Times  

Thousands of lives were lost during the Partition of India. Kashmir: Book 3 of the Partition Trilogy by Manreet Sodhi Someshwar ₹499; HarperCollins Sodhi Someshwar’s Partition Trilogy, which includes Lahore: Book 1, Hyderabad: Book 2, and Kashmir: Book 3, not only tells the story of the Partition of India but also informs readers about the drama that unfolded during the accession of an array of states to India. A Lost People’s Archive by Rimli Sengupta ₹399; Aleph Sengupta notes that this, her debut novel, was “sparked by a found notebook” and “is based on the true story of a woman and a man”. The Book of Everlasting Things by Aanchal Malhotra ₹799; HarperCollins Publishers “His nose woke up first,” thus begins this multigenerational saga centred not only around the Partition of India but also on perfumery, referring to a subliminal link between memory and the role a fragrance in recollections of the past. Ladies’ Tailor by Priya Hajela ₹309; HarperCollins Publishers What distinguishes Hajela’s debut novel from other books on the Partition is the fact that it’s centred on the spirit of rebuilding.

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History of this topic

Book Review | Renewal or break? A Partition memoir
8 months, 1 week ago

Book Review | Renewal or break? A Partition memoir

Deccan Chronicle  

As a member of a Partition-affected family, I have always had a strong attraction to stories about that time in India when cries for division were suddenly added to calls for Independence from British rule. Yet the second my editor suggested that I review Broken Threads: My Family from Empire to Independence by Mishal Husain, a British journalist of Pakistani …

The memories of Partition in the contemporary imagination
10 months, 3 weeks ago

The memories of Partition in the contemporary imagination

The Hindu  

British historian Eric Hobsbawm once remarked that “History is to nationalism what a poppy is to a heroin addict.” History is not something that can be comprehended just as a form of knowledge about the world we live in. Through the eyes of Asaf and his friends we encounter an alternative perspective on events, one rarely found in the mainstream …

Review of Ritu Menon’s India on Their Minds: Writing like three-ply yarn
1 year, 6 months ago

Review of Ritu Menon’s India on Their Minds: Writing like three-ply yarn

The Hindu  

When Gandhi visited Jallianwala Bagh after the massacre of 1919, he stayed at Saraladebi Chaudhurani’s home who was deeply influenced by him. Tagore’s niece had been a staunch supporter of a “martial Hinduism” but, following Gandhi’s steps, took up the cause of swadeshi, much to her husband Rambhuja Chaudhury’s chagrin “for what he thought of as Gandhi’s weak-kneed non-violence.” In …

Partition: Tales of love, longing, and loss
1 year, 7 months ago

Partition: Tales of love, longing, and loss

Hindustan Times  

India’s march as a free country began on a tragic note in 1947 as the horrors of Partition tore families and communities asunder. 76 years on, Sadia Akhtar talks to three families to chronicle their extraordinary journeys across the frontier to build a life for themselves in India, and the fading memories of a land they once called home Jaideep …

Manreet Sodhi Someshwar, author, The Partition Trilogy - “We are all villains”
2 years ago

Manreet Sodhi Someshwar, author, The Partition Trilogy - “We are all villains”

Hindustan Times  

How did the idea for a Partition trilogy come about? That’s when I was like, “This is the history that I’ve seen around me!” I also feel that Partition is not one story. When I started off initially people would be like, “Oh, Jawaharlal Nehru used to drink.” No, he didn’t drink. The idea of women’s bodies as battlefields and …

When pangs of partition still hurt
2 years, 1 month ago

When pangs of partition still hurt

The Hindu  

Author Geetanjali Shree’s session on ‘The Making of a Masterpiece’ at The Hindu Lit for Life 2023 on Saturday was punctured with sporadic laughter and applause as she spoke about how the word ‘masterpiece’ made her uncomfortable. The acclaimed Hindi author who won the International Booker Prize in 2022 for her book Tomb of Sand spoke about the need to …

Review: Bollywood, Tollywood and Beyond – Literary Essays on Indian Films
2 years, 2 months ago

Review: Bollywood, Tollywood and Beyond – Literary Essays on Indian Films

Hindustan Times  

Film studies has widened the scope of writing on film and has also broadened the readership, taking it beyond the exclusive domain of film scholars and academics who teach film theory. Among these one may mention her analysis and study into films like Deepa Mehta’s Earth 1947 based on Bapsi Sidhwa’s novel The Ice Candy Man, and a very detailed …

ESSAY | Remembering the Dalit experience of Partition on Ambedkar’s death anniversary
2 years, 3 months ago

ESSAY | Remembering the Dalit experience of Partition on Ambedkar’s death anniversary

The Hindu  

Published : Dec 01, 2022 10:35 IST Remembering and forgetting go hand in hand. At the very beginning, they pay tribute to the “spirit of enterprise” and “hard work” of Partition refugees who came into Delhi. Dutta explained was through their “superior initiative and enterprise”, there is this passage from Greater Delhi about the refugee from East Bengal: “He is …

Independence: A psychologically adroit successor to Little Women
2 years, 4 months ago

Independence: A psychologically adroit successor to Little Women

Firstpost  

One of Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni ’s greatest strengths as a novelist is the sheer strength of her characterisation. Published in 1956, less than a decade after Partition, Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan was perhaps the first great Partition novel of them all. Both raped.” Anita Desai’s novel Clear Light of Day is an atypical choice for this list but in …

Review: Hyderabad: Book 2 of The Partition Trilogy by Manreet Sodhi Someshwar
2 years, 4 months ago

Review: Hyderabad: Book 2 of The Partition Trilogy by Manreet Sodhi Someshwar

Hindustan Times  

Set primarily in 1948, a period of much chaos in a newly independent India, Hyderabad is the second part of Manreet Sodhi Someshwar’s Partition trilogy. At the time, Hyderabad was India’s largest and wealthiest princely State, ruled by the world’s richest man, the seventh Nizam of Hyderabad, Mir Osman Ali Khan, Asaf Jah VII, who carried a multitude of oddities …

Interview, Aanchal Malhotra, Author, Remnants of Partition: 21 Objects from a Continent Divided? - “You learn to take care of the sadness of others”
2 years, 5 months ago

Interview, Aanchal Malhotra, Author, Remnants of Partition: 21 Objects from a Continent Divided? - “You learn to take care of the sadness of others”

Hindustan Times  

How do you feel about the award? The international edition published by C Hurst & Co The committee has taken note of the “moral and ethical underpinnings” of your work with Partition survivors. The book, which was published by C Hurst & Co globally, was published under a different title by HarperCollins India – Remnants of a Separation: A History …

Partition and the heavy bangle of history
2 years, 6 months ago

Partition and the heavy bangle of history

The Hindu  

The Indian freedom movement is the success story of nationalism in South Asia, and Partition and its memory are part of the unresolved narratives that the movement carried within itself. Marvel’, from the Marvel Cinematic Universe, starring Canadian-Pakistani actress Iman Vellani attempts to introduce the collective tragedy of Partition from a point of triumph and inclusivity. The realist angle Retelling …

5 books and films that tell the story of the trauma of the Partition of India and its aftermath
2 years, 7 months ago

5 books and films that tell the story of the trauma of the Partition of India and its aftermath

Salon  

Editor's note: At midnight on Aug. 14, 1947, India achieved independence from British colonial rule and Pakistan was created as a separate homeland for Muslims. "My Name is Radha: The Essential Manto" Recommended by professor Madhur Anand, University of Guelph, Ontario, Canada Partition in South Asia refers to that horrific year when an arbitrary red line was drawn across a …

Writing Partition: A violent birth
2 years, 7 months ago

Writing Partition: A violent birth

The Hindu  

Published : Aug 14, 2022 06:00 IST Seventy-five years after Partition, its memory remains strong and graphic. Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan, perhaps the best-known Partition novel, is set in the small border village of Mano Majra, which was declared to be in India. “I lobbed grenades into the windows of Sikhs and Hindus I’d known all my life,” boasts …

India at 75 | What would a conclave of Partition writers look like?
2 years, 7 months ago

India at 75 | What would a conclave of Partition writers look like?

The Hindu  

‘Zindaginama’ by Krishna Sobti The magnum opus of one of the all-time great Hindi writers, this novel eschews traditional plot structures and character development to deliver a stunning, wide-angle view of both Partition and Indian society in general. ‘Basti’ by Intizar Hussain Intizar Hussain is one of the most important Pakistani writers of all time and Basti was the work …

Book Review: S.S. Sharma's 'The Great Tragedy of India’s Partition’ helps to understand the circumstances of India’s Partition
3 years, 1 month ago

Book Review: S.S. Sharma's 'The Great Tragedy of India’s Partition’ helps to understand the circumstances of India’s Partition

The Hindu  

P artition, or rather the vivisection of India, as Mahatma Gandhi termed it, is a theme of enduring interest, both to the rapidly diminishing generation that suffered and survived it and to the succeeding generations in the subcontinent. As for the Lahore Resolution, adopted in March 1940 by the Muslim League without mentioning the word “Pakistan”, the author correctly points …

‘Partition is resonating loudly in our present’
3 years, 5 months ago

‘Partition is resonating loudly in our present’

Live Mint  

In Manreet Sodhi Someshwar’s latest novel, Lahore, the first part of a projected trilogy chronicling the human costs of the partition of the subcontinent, there is an electric charge from the very first page. Two friends, Beli Ram and Mehmood, who have grown up together in “Laur”, are caught in the crossfire between a rally by the Muslim League demanding …

What does fiction tell us about Partition?
3 years, 7 months ago

What does fiction tell us about Partition?

The Hindu  

Parsing Partition is a national pastime. Daisy Rockwell tries to explain why in the Afterword to her translation of Khadija Mastur’s A Promised Land : “Like the Holocaust, or the American Civil War, or the French Revolution or any other epochal conflict that has shredded the fabric of society and caused many deaths, it is both a deep psychic preoccupation …

Interview: Pallavi Raghavan, Author, Animosity at Bay: An Alternative History of the India-Pakistan Relationship
4 years, 2 months ago

Interview: Pallavi Raghavan, Author, Animosity at Bay: An Alternative History of the India-Pakistan Relationship

Hindustan Times  

Often, even as India and Pakistan exchange lists of nuclear installations and hold talks about the Indus Water Treaty, ceasefire violations and retaliatory shelling continue along the Line of Control. We need to remember that the story of “othering” is just one of many different kinds of narratives that can be shaped around the subcontinent’s history. It’s a slower process …

A young girl's Partition account
6 years, 6 months ago

A young girl's Partition account

Deccan Chronicle  

The story is set in 1947, a time when the India-Pakistan partition took place. Either the history I read was hard to take in because there was so much loss and violence or I felt like I might not be able to portray Nisha and her family realistically, or the format was giving me challenges.” Conversations with her father and …

Partition: Borders of Blood
7 years, 7 months ago

Partition: Borders of Blood

Al Jazeera  

Seventy years after the partition of India, we examine the troubled legacy of the event that shaped the subcontinent. Follow Al Jazeera’s coverage of the 70 years of India-Pakistan partition It sparked three wars, the birth of Bangladesh, and transformed Kashmir into one of the world’s most militarised zone. As tensions between India and Pakistan persist, 101 East explores partition’s …

Partition of India: Objects that tell the story of a mass exodus
7 years, 7 months ago

Partition of India: Objects that tell the story of a mass exodus

CNN  

Editor’s Note: Aanchal Malhotra is a New Delhi-based artist, oral historian and author of “Remnants of a Separation: A History of the Partition through Material Memory.” The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author. In many Indian and Pakistani families like mine, “Partition” has become a word unspoken, shrouded in silence and sheathed with painful memories. …

Portraits of women
13 years, 11 months ago

Portraits of women

The Hindu  

Showcasing the strengths and limits of a narrowly conceived project of feminist history writing. The interest that the women's movement aroused has generated research on a range of subjects, and there is ample source material available to undertake complex social analysis from a historical perspective. That perhaps explains the drive to cover themes as vast and diverse as region, environment, …

Partition: conflict for state power
15 years, 2 months ago

Partition: conflict for state power

The Hindu  

History is often dismissively spoken of as about ‘dead yesterdays’; but like Bram Stoker’s ‘Un-Dead Count Dracula,’ it has a wicked habit of returning to the world of the living to haunt it. The Partition has been called variously as a “vivisection,” “an imperialist betrayal,” and “a historical denouement of two-nation theory.” Those found ‘guilty’ have been ‘impeached’, counterfactual histories …

Rushdie’s new novel, Partition literature, India after 1947 and more | The Hindu on Books
77 years, 5 months ago

Rushdie’s new novel, Partition literature, India after 1947 and more | The Hindu on Books

The Hindu  

This article forms a part of The Hindu on Books newsletter which brings you book reviews, reading recommendations, interviews with authors and more. As he writes in his memoir, Joseph Anton, “If he was going to have one last try at achieving his dream, he didn’t want it to be with a safe, conservative, middling little book.” In reviews, we …

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