6/9/2023 0 Comments Partition by Urvashi ButaliaShe contextualizes the stories by also narrating an official history of partition that covers the major events, including the story of her own divided family. In Butalia’s oral histories both perpetrators and victims of the violence in Punjab reveal amazing stories of complicity and action. In this book, Urvashi Butalia turns to oral histories to tell the real story of the violence in Delhi and across North India in 1947. In response, South Asian scholars began to see for the first time, the holes in the official narratives of India’s 1947 partition into independent Pakistan and India. Delhi-ites were horrified to discover both the inaction of the local authorities to provide safety and security for citizens, and the failure of the media to report the atrocities taking place. In the wake of Indira Gandhi’s assassination by her Sikh bodyguard, the citizens of Delhi unleashed a murderous campaign of violence on the Sikh community as a whole. Urvashi Butalia’s remarkable book on India’s partition emerged out of the terrible violence that gripped Delhi, not in 1947, when the partition took place, but in 1984.
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