Books on Partition and Independence: Author-wise List

Partition and the coming of freedom produced one of the largest bodies of writing in modern India, and examiners draw on it freely because every item in it is a fixed pair: a title and the person who wrote it. The questions are never about literary judgement; they ask who wrote Train to Pakistan or in which language Tamas was written. This note arranges the writing in groups so that the pairs stay apart in memory, and adds the awards and the dates that are asked with them.

Memoirs and accounts by those who were there

Novels and stories of Partition

This is the group from which most questions come, because the titles are famous and the languages differ. Train to Pakistan, set in the imaginary border village of Mano Majra, was written in English by Khushwant Singh in 1956. Tamas, meaning darkness, is Bhisham Sahni's Hindi novel on the communal violence of 1947 and won him the Sahitya Akademi Award. Pinjar, in English The Skeleton, is Amrita Pritam's Punjabi novel of an abducted woman, from which the film of the same name was made; her famous lament for Partition is the poem addressed to Waris Shah. Jhootha Sach, translated as This Is Not That Dawn, is Yashpal's two-part Hindi novel of Lahore before and after the division. Kitne Pakistan by Kamleshwar, another Hindi novel on the theme, took the Sahitya Akademi Award in 2003.

• Azadi - Chaman Nahal's English novel, which won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1977.
• Ice-Candy-Man, published in America as Cracking India - Bapsi Sidhwa, seen through the eyes of a Parsi child in Lahore.
• Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie, which won the Booker Prize in 1981.
• A Bend in the Ganges - Manohar Malgonkar, whose title comes from a line in the Ramayana.
• Sunlight on a Broken Column - Attia Hosain, on a Muslim taluqdari family of Lucknow.
• The Shadow Lines - Amitav Ghosh, on borders and memory, which won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1989.
• Basti - Intizar Husain's Urdu novel of migration to Pakistan.
• Aag Ka Darya, in English River of Fire - Qurratulain Hyder's Urdu novel.
• Clear Light of Day - Anita Desai, set in Old Delhi.

The short story, where Partition is written most sharply

Saadat Hasan Manto is the name to know first. His Urdu story Toba Tek Singh, about the exchange of inmates of a lunatic asylum between the two new countries, is the single most quoted piece of Partition fiction, and his collection of one-line sketches, Siyah Hashiye or Black Margins, and the story Thanda Gosht belong with it; the English selection of his work is called Mottled Dawn. Rajinder Singh Bedi's Urdu story Lajwanti, on the return of an abducted woman, and Ismat Chughtai's writing on the same years are set beside him. Krishna Sobti's Hindi writing and Rahi Masoom Raza's Adha Gaon, on a Shia village in Uttar Pradesh, extend the same ground.

History and research on Partition

The events the books are written about

A few dates anchor the whole reading list. The plan announced on 3 June 1947, usually called the Mountbatten Plan, accepted the division of the country. The Indian Independence Act was passed by the British Parliament and received assent in July 1947. The boundary in Punjab and Bengal was drawn by the commission headed by Sir Cyril Radcliffe, and the line still carries his name. Pakistan came into being on 14 August 1947 and India became independent on 15 August 1947, the midnight on which Nehru made the speech known by its phrase about a tryst with destiny. It is this midnight that gives both Freedom at Midnight and Midnight's Children their titles, which is why the two are so often placed in the same question.

How to hold the list in memory

• Group by language: Hindi gives Tamas, Jhootha Sach, Kitne Pakistan and Adha Gaon; Urdu gives Toba Tek Singh, Basti and Aag Ka Darya; Punjabi gives Pinjar.
• Group by award: Azadi in 1977 and Kitne Pakistan in 2003 for the Sahitya Akademi, The Shadow Lines in 1989, and Midnight's Children for the Booker Prize in 1981.
• Group the two-author books together, Freedom at Midnight by Collins and Lapierre and Borders and Boundaries by Menon and Bhasin, because single-author options are the usual trap.
• Keep the two Menons apart: Vapal Pangunni Menon the civil servant who wrote on the transfer of power, and Ritu Menon the writer on women in Partition.