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The partition of India, and the trauma that followed, led litterateurs of the subcontinent to write poignantly of the horror and pain of this colossal uprooting of people in modern history. In an invaluable addition to the genre of Partition literature, Alok Bhalla explores the concept of boundaries and homes through his interviews with six well-known novelists from India and Pakistan. In conversations with Intizar Husain, Krishna Sobti, Bhisham Sahni, Krishna Baldev Vaid, Kamleshwar, and Bapsi Sidhwa, Bhalla invokes their personal experiences and memories of the years around 1947; their families in pre-Partition India; their Hindu, Muslim, or Sikh neighbours; their ideological shifts; their difficult days of survival amidst the carnage, and the impact of Partition on their writings. These interviews suggest new ways of reading and interpreting Partition fiction and the politics of religious identities which continues to torment us even today. The introductory essay explores the many human concerns of Partition fiction, including the desire to find ways of living with the memories of the experience. Bhalla analyses the work of several Indian and Pakistani writers—Badiuzzaman, Rahi Masoom Raza, Saadat Hasan Manto, Qurratalain Hyder, Joginder Paul, Abdus Samad, Bapsi Sidhwa, Intizar Husain, Khadija Mastur, Yashpal, Attia Hosain, and others—to touch upon issues like migration, threat to peoples’ religious beliefs, as also recollections of lost homes, abandoned cultures, and betrayed traditions.
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