Abstract
OFFICIALLY, Partition has been forgotten in India, its painful memories put aside. No mention is made of it in government documents, and its enormous, long-term human costs do not figure in histories of the subcontinent. Unofficially, however, these histories live on, inside families and communities, and are told and retold: people recall the time when, suddenly, neighbour turned upon neighbour, friends became foes, boundaries were suddenly set up, and whole lifetimes of sharing had to be put aside and new, hostile identities assumed. Communities separated into 'them' and 'us', religion became the marker of identity, borders were suddenly drawn across villages and communities.
These are the many hidden histories of Partition, the things history books don't tell us about. In the 10 years or so that I have been working on Partition, it is these histories that I have listened to, these that have led me to realise how this cataclysm affected the lives of ordinary people, those who live on the margins of society — women, children, the poor, untouchables. In each of the stories I listened to, there was a different telling, a different experience.
There are hundreds of such histories: histories that tell us that Partition was not only about being Hindu and Muslim, it was about being a harijan [untouchable], a woman, a child; about love and sharing, about friendships. Only when we begin to listen to the stories of Partition's survivors shall we begin to understand: only through the cracks in the official version do we find the human actors who are the real stuff of any history.