This review is cross posted with my GoodReads account.

I have been interested in the Partition of India for a long time now. In fact, I have been long interested in the entire history of British India starting off from the days of the East India Company, the fierce Indian Rebellion of 1857, and the 89 years of the British Raj.

The Partition is a dramatic event that has had massive, long-lasting historical effects. It is also a piece of history that most Westerners are not familiar with. The broad summary is this: Britain after World War II realized that it could not afford to keep India - the former crown jewel of its Empire. The Independence of India was happening, but what will post-Britain India look like? Two crusading parties eventually lead to the realization that India will have to be split. Independence Day comes abruptly and with literally no advance warning of what the borders will look like. What happens is one of the world’s biggest migration events as Muslims and Hindus flee their ancestral homes to their “rightful” homes.

The book goes deeply into the context of the events, a relatively objective observer. The author has familial roots from both countries, which I think gives her a unique perspective. She goes deep into the election that decides the Partition and the lies both parties campaigned on to get themselves elected. The ridiculous things candidates promised their people whipped up expectations from the start. For a people who expects “freedom” without actually defining what that means, this sets the stage for a ruinous disaster.

Not that the British are blameless. True that they had no script to work off - they had never done something like this before - but it is weak justification for what happened. India had been increasingly destabilizing as soon as World War II ended. Britain, burdened by a titanic war debt, did not have the will or the resources to reassert control over their imperial lands. Their people simply wanted it over with. Understandable, but their haphazard actions - from withholding the announcement of the Radcliffe Line for 4 days to crudely splitting the British Indian army into respective religions (reversing decades of thoughtful work towards integration of the Muslims and Hindus) - set the stage for decades of war and animosity between today’s India and Pakistan.

The actual rancor and visceral experience of the Partition migrations are left to simple words, which fall far short of what presumably happened. Events that could be dramatized in entire novels are summarized in dry statements of history. I wish I could have gotten to know the stories behind these statements. For example, a passing paragraph mentions police shooting 18 people in a village dead or another talks about how frenzied soldiers shot 30 people randomly from the windows of a train car. That is … disturbing, but the author leaves it at that. Such events - far from us today - are filtered through time, forgotten except for something like this. Sometimes there is just not enough documentation.

I enjoyed this book for its readable style and fateful approach to the event. The Partition of India continues to fascinate me, and I hope to read much more about in the future.