Books & Authors Quiz: Books on Partition and Independence

Train to Pakistan, published in 1956, is set in the imaginary border village of Mano Majra and follows what a trainload of bodies does to a village where Sikhs and Muslims had lived together; it is the best known English novel of Partition.

Tamas, meaning darkness, is Bhisham Sahni's Hindi novel on the days of killing in a town of western Punjab, and it won him the Sahitya Akademi Award; a well known television serial was made from it.

Pinjar, in English The Skeleton, tells the story of Puro, a woman abducted at the time of the division, and is the central Punjabi novel of Partition; Amrita Pritam's poem addressed to Waris Shah is the other work of hers always cited on this theme.

The two journalists, one American and one French, wrote Freedom at Midnight as a narrative account of the last year of British rule, the division of the country and the killing of Gandhi, drawing on interviews with Mountbatten.

Azad, who was president of the Congress through the Quit India years, gave his account of the negotiations leading to Partition in India Wins Freedom, written in Urdu and rendered into English with the help of Humayun Kabir; a portion of it was withheld from publication for thirty years.

Toba Tek Singh, in which an inmate refuses either country and dies on the strip of land between the two borders, is the most quoted single piece of Partition writing; Manto's other work on these years includes the story Thanda Gosht and the collection of one-line sketches Siyah Hashiye.

Azadi follows a Hindu family of Sialkot forced to leave for India, and it brought its author the Sahitya Akademi Award in English in 1977.

The correct answer is B, Urvashi Butalia, whose book is built out of interviews with survivors and is the standard work on Partition as remembered by ordinary people, especially women and children.

Midnight's Children takes its title from the children born at the midnight of independence, its narrator Saleem Sinai being born at the very hour, and it won the Booker Prize in 1981 and was later voted the best of the Booker winners.

The correct answer is C, Ayesha Jalal, whose study argues that the demand for Pakistan worked for a long while as a bargaining position in the politics of the 1940s, and it is the standard academic work on Jinnah's role.

Jhootha Sach is a Hindi novel in two parts, the first on Lahore before the division and the second on the lives of those uprooted by it, and it is among the longest works of fiction on Partition.