Tag Archives: Pakistan

In My Hands Today…

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Beyond the Border: An Indian in Pakistan – Yoginder Sikand

Beyond the Border, based on two journeys that Yoginder Sikand undertook to Pakistan, covering Lahore, Multan, Hyderabad (Sindh), Moenjo Daro, Bhit Shah, and Islamabad, among others, is a strikingly unconventional account of what life is like for “ordinary” Pakistanis. The Pakistan he discovers only remotely resembles the stereotypical Muslim nation of the Hindu imagination. From Shiela, the daughter of a feudal lord, named after her mother’s Indian best friend to a rundown local eatery owner who offers the author free food because Sikand is the first Indian to visit his stall, encounters with Pakistanis from all walks of life draws up a very different picture – that Pakistan is a country as diverse, paradoxical and rich in narratives as India.

Departing from the fiercely polemical rhetoric common in Indian and Pakistani accounts of each other, Yoginder Sikand, not only gives lie to the strategist’s view of the India-Pakistan divide, but dispels the myths that have filtered into the Indian psyche about Pakistan being the terrible other. In this brilliantly perceptive and quirky travelogue, he illuminates the Pakistani side of the story, while telling his own tale of exploration and self-discovery.

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The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India – Urvashi Butalia

The partition of India into two countries, India and Pakistan, caused one of the most massive human convulsions in history. Within the space of two months in 1947 more than twelve million people were displaced. A million died. More than seventy-five thousand women were abducted and raped. Countless children disappeared. Homes, villages, communities, families, and relationships were destroyed. Yet, more than half a century later, little is known of the human dimensions of this event.

In The Other Side of Silence , Urvashi Butalia fills this gap by placing people—their individual experiences, their private pain—at the center of this epochal event.Through interviews conducted over a ten-year period and an examination of diaries, letters, memoirs, and parliamentary documents, Butalia asks how people on the margins of history—children, women, ordinary people, the lower castes, the untouchables—have been affected by this upheaval.

To understand how and why certain events become shrouded in silence, she traces facets of her own poignant and partition-scarred family history before investigating the stories of other people and their experiences of the effects of this violent disruption. Those whom she interviews reveal that, at least in private, the voices of partition have not been stilled and the bitterness remains.

Throughout, Butalia reflects on difficult questions: what did community, caste, and gender have to do with the violence that accompanied partition? What was partition meant to achieve and what did it actually achieve? How, through unspeakable horrors, did the survivors go on? Believing that only by remembering and telling their stories can those affected begin the process of healing and forgetting, Butalia presents a sensitive and moving account of her quest to hear the painful truth behind the silence.

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Tales of Two Cities – Kuldip Nayar and Asif Noorani

In Tales of Two Cities, two eminent journalists – Kuldip Nayar and Asif Noorani – give their personal accounts of the Partition of India, the killings and massive migrations which it provoked and their subsequent impact on Indo-Pakistan relations.

As a young law graduate, Kuldip Nayar witnessed at first hand the collapse of trust between communities in Sialkot and was forced to migrate with his family to Delhi across the blood-stained plains of Punjab. He vividly describes his own perilous journey and his first job as a young journalist in an Urdu newspaper reporting on Gandhi’s assassination.

Asif Noorani, while still a schoolboy in Bombay, set off with his family by steamer across the Arabian Sea for the promised land of Pakistan, ultimately settling in Karachi. He gives his own compelling account of the difficulties faced by the new arrivals and the slow emergence of today’s megacity with its dominant Mohajir culture.

Both authors write with authority about their ancestral homes and their adopted cities, which have played so large a role in bilateral relations. This is a book about a trauma which transformed the subcontinent and still exerts a powerful influence today. These are personal narratives bringing to life a lost world of harmonious relations which each author in his own way is still to recreate.

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Orphan of Islam – Alexander Khan

“I’ve told you before, and I will tell you again, if you are unable to read the Holy Book you will be punished.” The teacher’s face was a mask of anger. “Understand?”

Born in 1975 in the UK to a Pakistani father and an English mother, Alexander Khan spent his early years as a Muslim in the north of England. But at the age of three, his family was torn apart when his father took him to Pakistan. Despite his desperate cries, that was the last he saw of his mother – he was told she had walked out and abandoned them; many years later he learned she was told he’d died in a car crash in Pakistan.

Three years on Alex is brought back to England, but kept hidden at all times. His father disappears to Pakistan again, leaving Alex in the care of a stepmother and her cruel brother. And it is then that his troubles really begin. Seen as an outsider by both the white kids and the Pakistani kids, Alex is lost and alone.

When his father dies unexpectedly, Alex is sent back to Pakistan to stay with his ‘family’ and learn to behave like a ‘good Muslim’. Now alone in a strange, hostile country, with nobody to protect him, Alex realises what it is to be truly orphaned. No one would listen. No one would help. And no one cared when he was kidnapped by men from his own family and sent to a fundamentalist Madrassa on the Afghanistan border.

A fascinating and compelling account of a young boy caught between two cultures, this book tells the true story of a child desperately searching for his place in the world; the tale of a boy, lost and alone, trying to find a way to repair a life shattered by the shocking event he witnessed through a crack in the door of a house in an isolated village in Pakistan.

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The Lost River: On The Trail of the Sarasvati – Michel Danino

The Lost River explores the geography, history, and mythology, of the Sarasvati river, drawing from various sources like folklore, the Vedas, archaeology, local practices, history, geology, and meteorology. The book explains that the river, its very existence, and its course have been discussed and speculated over for years. The magnificence of the Sarasvati has been detailed in scriptures like the Rig Veda. Historians and archaeologists could not understand how it mysteriously ceased to exist. Some of the even deem the river a myth.

This book attempts the deduce facts from fable and makes a strong case for the existence of the river. It goes over the upheavals that the Indian subcontinent went through thousands of years ago, explaining the dry weather, erosion, and tectonic events that changed the terrain, altered river courses, and may have made the Sarasvati disappear. The book then chronicles explorations into the river started, which began around the early nineteenth century, when it was rediscovered by British officials doing topographic explorations.

The book also explains the culture around that time, shedding light on the Indus valley civilisation and the rich and flourishing culture of Harappa. The book goes on the show the results of explorations into the river’s origins and course using modern technology like satellite imagery and isotope analysis. The author has also used his proof of the existence of the river to bolster his theory that Aryans were indigenous to India and not foreign invaders.