Book review
The Partition of India in 1947 caused one of the great human convulsions of history. The statistics are staggering. Twelve million people were displaced; a million died; seventy-five thousand women are said to have been abducted and raped; families were divided; properties lost; homes destroyed. In public memory, however, the violent, disturbing realities that accompanied Partition have remained blanketed in silence. And yet, in private, the voices of Partition have never been stilled and its ramifications have not yet ended.

Urvashi Butalia’s remarkable book, the outcome of a decade of interviews and research, looks at what Partition was intended to achieve, and how it worked on the ground, and in people’s lives. Pieced together from oral narratives and testimonies, in many cases from women, children and dalits—marginal voices never heard before—and supplemented by documents, reports, diaries, memoirs and parliamentary records, this is a moving, personal chronicle of Partition that places people, instead of grand politics, at the centre. These are the untold stories of Partition, stories that India has not dared to confront even after fifty years of independence.

‘These shaming histories—so long under wraps—are narrated with honesty and clarity and informed by compassion.’
—Bapsi Sidhwa

‘A brave, moving and troubling book that voices, for the first time, dark truths about our history.’
—Sunil Khilnani

‘A book every thinking Indian should read.’
—Biblio


About the author co-founder of India's first feminist publishing house, Kali for Women. Urvashi Butalia has won the 2003 Nikkei Asia Prize for Culture, one of Japan's most prestigious awards. The prize is in recognition of her authoring The Other Side of Silence, which the judges called 'an excellent and important account of women and children coping with tragedy after the partition of India in 1947'