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Journalism of Courage
An American Witness to India8217;s Partition
By Phillips Talbot, Sage
Talbot came to India in the late 1930s in the service of a New York think tank to study the country at a time when a change in the global chessboard was clearly on the cards. This forthcoming volume is a compilation of letters he sent back to the Institute of Current World Affairs. Put in context by historian B.R. Nanda, they unfold the events as they happened. 8220;That Talbot should have come to India not as a foreign correspondent of a newspaper but as a scholar-observer turned out to be an advantage,8221; points out Nanda in the foreword. 8220;He did not have to submit to the rigorous wartime censorship in his dispatches to New York, nor did he have to observe word limits or trim his views to suit the editorial predilections of a particular newspaper or magazine.8221; Especially valuable are reports of long stretches spent in the company of Gandhi, Nehru, Patel and Jinnah 8212; besides his more or less sociological observations in those transformational times, including a stint in Santiniketan.
The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan
By Yasmin Khan
Yale University Press
Khan, a historian based in Britain, keeps keen focus on a shorter time span. And looking back, it is easy to lose track of how quickly the transfer of power really happened. In March 1947, Mountbatten had taken charge as viceroy of India, with the responsibility of operationalising the empire8217;s retreat by June 1948. In a broadcast on June 3, 1947, the date of handover 8212; and Partition 8212; was announced: August 15. That is, just over two months to, among other more problematic things, split the possessions of libraries between India and Pakistan see photograph. Just how unprepared the colonial administration was, Khan says, can be conveyed in this short quote from Mountbatten. Asked if he foresaw a considerable transfer of population between the two dominions, he replied, 8220;Personally I don8217;t see it.8221; Khan8217;s main contribution is in describing how ordinary people got on with the process of relocation in that volatile, almost chaotic, atmosphere.
Oxford University Press
Kaur takes forward in time the study of lives affected by Partition, focussing on migrants from NWFP and West Punjab in Delhi. Among other things, the illustrative life stories shed as much light on the making of the city as about the migrants. She also describes 8220;the government policies and practices of resettlement, wherein 8216;compensation8217; against property lost in Pakistan was the key criterion8230; The entire resettlement exercise was meant to restore the national and personal losses incurred during Partition. Somehow, the national loss and the personal loss of migrants had the same need for restoration, albeit at different levels8221;. What Kaur8217;s case studies also show is that the only uniting factor for this group of people is the master narrative of being uprooted and re-situated, not anything ethnic or cultural.
