Perhaps the book's best aspect is how it allows space for the stories of those who perpetrated violence during Partition.

The novel tracks the childhood of Abdul Khaleq, which comes back to the man every sleepless, teary-eyed night. The chapters alternate between these recollections—taking residence in rural 1940s Kolkata—and the now, where schoolteacher Khaleq repeats a daily Sisyphean routine in newly christened-Bangladesh.

In Midnight's Borders (Westland Publications, 2021), author and photographer Suchitra Vijayan travels the 9,000 miles of India's borders to understand what Partition did to individual lives and communities, and how it continues to incite violence, displacement, prejudice, and trauma among those who live in the border regions.

With this list, we bring to attention the books recently released which deal with the politics and loss associated with this defining moment in history, in the form of both fiction and nonfiction. 

After seven decades, many of the victims of 1947 partition are getting a chance to get a glimpse of their ancestral lands once again, thanks to a virtual reality project by a team of tech and history enthusiasts from Oxford University. Here’s the story of Project Dastaan, and of people yearning to go back home.

My father, who practised medicine, was stopped from migrating whenever he thought of moving out of Sialkot. One day, my mother and he decided to travel without letting people know. They boarded the train unnoticed.

The fateful line of Radcliffe, as most of us know, not only decided the border between two new states (India and Pakistan) but also sealed the fate of millions of people.