Old Maps and New: Legacies of the Partition

‘This was the city from which my grandmother, hugging two teenage sons close to her, had boarded a ship packed tight with refugees heading for Bombay—never to see her homeland again.’ With this sentence starts a journey across time and several borders—including those of the mind—as the author begins a quest back into the past to understand how dislocation and loss of home impacts on families and how it interweaves with history to create the present we inhabit. This compelling journey criss-crosses a landscape consisting of the contemporary, the past, the peace movement and the women’s movement in India and Pakistan, moving from the deeply personal to broader social and historic concerns and back again. This is rare and deeply moving piece of introspection, brimming with the energy of actual experience seen through the eyes of a woman whose own background in literature, women’s studies and social activism forms the perspective from which she speaks. Kavita Panjabi teaches Comparative Literature and Women’s Studies at Jadavpur University, Calcutta.