Customer Reviews

The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India

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Having researched the whys and wherefores of the India/Pakistan Partition quite a bit, I have been surprised by how little has been heard from the people who lived through it (compared to other historical cataclysms such as the Holocaust, World Wars, etc.). Most books on Partition tend to concentrate on the "big picture", with a few anecdotes thrown in as an afterthought. This book provided by far the best account of how the Partition affected real people and real lives. The sections on the impact of Partition on women, children and the untouchables are especially powerful. Highly recommended, even for people who may not be familiar with this monstrous tragedy. You can't help but be moved by the first-hand accounts of such intense pain and suffering. Those interested in the human aspect of Partition should also watch "Earth", a great Indian movie on this subject.

a lot of the criticism regarding repetition is fair, yes. But it misses the point. Ms. Butalia has done something that really no other author has: record first-person accounts of the partition violence, from a population that is rapidly dwindling due to age. It is regrettable that more of such work has not been done. Of course she has her own agenda-- she is angry, and especially towards the violence visited on women-- but at no point does she make an attempt to HIDE this bias. You've got to be blind not to know that there is a personal pain and anger driving all this, and what is the matter with that. Stop criticizing her for tangential stuff and focus on the unique scholarship here.

Urvashi Butalia is citizen and activist in India, the world's largest democracy. This book is a "must read" for those interested in the intersection of faith, ethnicity and identity in the Indian subcontinent in particular and in the world at large.

It is one of the few outstanding books on recent Indian history which integrates gender into the narrative to provide witness to the horror and pain of the subcontient's partition into India and Pakistan from the standpoint of one family, Butalia's own.

Part family biography, part oral history, this remarkably even-handed book deserves to be made into an epic movie.

Besides loss of property and loss of life, two of the subcontinent's many ethnic groups, more than all the others, underwent a sort of psychic dismemberment with partition that they have never really got over.

The Punjabis in the north, who lost west Punjab to Pakistan (and it is fair to say, west Punjab lost east Punjab to India) and the Bengalis of the east who saw east Bengal become East Pakistan, later Bangladesh, and West Bengal become a major state of the new Indian Union.

Urvashi, or someone with her exceptional gifts, needs to round out this narrative by doing a sequel on what happened in Bengal at Partition.

This book is one of my favorite accounts of partition... I'm surprised by the reviews that say the content is repetitive. I wonder how closely they read it? In that it talks about gendered aspects of partition and oral histories then I suppose it is, but I found it a powerful combination of memoir and history, one that I've turned to again and again over the years. In that it tells multiple tales out of hundreds of thousands of acts of murder, rape and other horrors, I suppose it is repititous - but that is the stuff of history... and through examining individual narratives Butalia gives insight into the larger forces that shaped and continue to shape modern South Asia.

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Somedays I wonder what was in the air the 1940's that made people worldwide so cruel to each other.

Having recently read Yasmin Khan's quiet and well-balanced account of the Partition of India, I find Butalia's book adds the human dimension, the pride, the fear, the anguish, and passion that brings the horrors of the Partition alive.

Urvashi Butalia's oral histories are extremely important resources for historians, sociologists, and for all who try to understand how the past informs the present.

This is a very compelling read.

Kim Burdick
Stanton, DE

This novel uses multiple stories taken from interviews to illustrate the effect of Partition on the people of India and Pakistan. The authors style is straight-forward. Definitely worth the read.

I have read this book, Mr. Moon's "Divide and Quit", Mr. Khosla's work, "Stern Reckoning" amongst others on the subject of the Partition. Ms. Butalia's work is so saturated with her personal opinions and idealogy, that it almost ceases to be a work on history than the airing of one's thoughts and mindset. Almost a diatribe, if I may. I will agree with what john_galt_who has written. I think he has hit the nail on the head. I did not consider this book worth either the money or the time.

I ordered this book because I am extremely interested in the
untold stories of the Partition of India even though the
reviews told me not to. I wished I had heeded the advice. The book is incredibly repetitive--to the point of being unreadable. I learned very little. Not worth the time to read or money to purchase.

The amount of matter which the author has repeated again and again if you minus all that repeated matter, the book would hardly be of about a 100 pages .. Don't even borrow to read it ..

Ms. Butalia's more than 250 page book could be told in 20, rest is jibberish about "her" feminism, newly found sikhi, and in general absolute irrelevant non-sense.
The books core is interviews with about 5 survirors, the interviews are badly done, they are really monologues. It's a shame that they told their most touching stories to her and she squandered these in her own confusion. She forgot that she is because someone didn't yield and let her be what she is, her femimism and sikhi and all. That the history shouldn't be explained but told and understood. I would recommend not reading anythings from quackpots like her and her promoter Mr. Rushdi. These people are just as dangerous as the people with guns who shoot without caring about the target.