The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan

One cannot talk or write about Partition without invoking a lot of emotions. As Ramchandra Guha also says that one biggest flaw in the writing of History is that the author himself/herself has an opinion and its most difficult to talk about the topic unbiased. But Yasmin Khan has risen to this challenge and left her text un-corrupted by any bias and I simply can't resist thanking her.
Yasmin Khan followed a contemporary historian's method of narrative history to describe the events during the dark days of Partition. While Maulana had described the various events leading to Partition, Yasmin Khan weaves a web of situations around this dreadful event.
The book is a slow starter and seems to be a little over analytic. But once you proceed to the third chapter, the narrative becomes nothing less than gripping.
For a generation born post emergency, its highly impossible to understand or even envisage the chaos of those times. But Yasmin's book through a collosal research and lucid writing has been able to do the impossible. She invokes images in mind which even well written novels like Tamas or Pinjar have not been able to do.
These were times which had no Parallel in history. There was no guiding post. To make it worse, communications were at there Nadir. We cannot deny it as the biggest Political error of the Modern India. But, Yasmin, as Maulana had illustrated that there was no single event which could have been pointed to lead us to these dark times. The seeds were sowed long back when Jinnah forming a Muslim League. All events post that just added to the pile and in 1947, we reached the tipping point over which Mountbatten just gave us a push.
Unlike Maulana, Yasmin Khan is not a Mountbatten fan. She has analyzed his actions to a great depth. Personally, in this part, the narrative to me seemed as if Mountbatten had a list of To-dos and Partition was just one of them.
When I shifted from Lucknow to Hoshiarpur in the 90s, the absence of mosque's and Muslims in this part of India was a shocker to me as a kid. I later thought that its just that Muslim's were centered a little more in UP and Sikh's in Punjab. But my readings of the Partition have made things more understandable.
Through Yasmin's book, I believe I have been able to live a life of the refugee for at least a week till I read this book. And if it was such an emotionally draining experience to just read, I just cannot imagine the trauma and horrors of the people who lived through. As one of the social workers remarked that the trauma was such that they didn't know what to say and how to console the ones affected; I would want to leave these horrors to rest for now.

Manish Saini