A Partition in the Mind

The partitioning of India in 1947 is widely noted as a defining moment in the history of the sub-continent. It is possibly still playing itself out over the last seven decades and more, as people of the sub-continent come to terms with who they are and what they stand for. In a wider sense, therefore, a better understanding of the events leading up to the Partition should lead to a better understanding why we are where we are today, or will be in the foreseeable future. This work attempts to weave together the strands of history from the Vedic times, and those of Gautama Buddha and Bhagwan Mahavira to the Mauryan Empire and later, and even early history of Islam in general, and of Islam in India, and facets of British rule, to provide a context to the core issue of the Partition. It goes on to examine the many circumstances and factors –some known, some poorly known, or plain unknown, which led to that traumatic event. It is tempting to say that the Partition, after all,was a plain sum-total of the effects of these many factors. That would be denying the “balance of evidence”, and the relatively higher weightage that ought to be given to some aspects, for the disproportionate role they played in the key period of the 1930s and40s. This, then, is an attempt at all that, on the premise that abetter understanding should lead to a more reasoned and rational acceptance of reality of life on the sub-continent. About the Author PROSENJIT DAS GUPTA was born in 1944 in Kolkata (on the eve of Partition, in a state that was it self partitioned) and was educated at St. Xavier’s School and then Presidency College, Kolkata. He worked from 1966 to 2008 in a leading chamber of commerce and in other industrial organisations, and has travelled widely in India and abroad. He has been researching and writing since the late 1990s, on topics that concerned and interested him, such as one on the city of Kolkata, on economic change in India over the last seventy years, on issues that engaged political discourse since independence of India and changing idiom of such discourse, his journeys into the tribal heartland of India, and more recently, on the Sino-Indian border conflict of 1962, another defining moment in India’s political and economic history. He is a bachelor, and is keenly interested in wildlife and conservation issues, folk culture, and Indian history.
236p/Paperback/5.83×8.27″