Independence Day Special: 10 Most Recommended Books To Read This Independence Day
Story highlights
Freedom at Midnight by Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins
This book follows the story of India’s independence movement during 1946 and 1948. It is an extensively researched book that gives incredible details of that period. It is a highly recommended book on India’s independence and the Partition. The book also includes interviews with Lord Mountbatten, the last viceroy of British India.
(WION)
The Argumentative Indian by Amartya Sen
It is a collection of essays that narrates India’s history and how that history has influenced and shaped its cultural identity. This vibrant past is something that Sen believes we all should know about – considering that it can have a deep impact on the way we embrace our future.
India after Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy by Ramachandra Guha
Guha in his book talks about India after it gained its independence. This is the perfect book for you to understand the evolution of Modern India from a chaotic and eventful history since independence – the Partition.
The Pity of Partition by Ayesha Jalal
Ayesha Jalal is Manto’s great-niece and in this book she writes about the constant suffering and trauma that Manto went through in the process of Partition. Her book carries Manto's expressions, untouched and virgin-- “Despite trying, I could not separate India from Pakistan, and Pakistan from India. Who owned the literature that had been written in undivided India? When I think of the recovered women, I think only of their bloated bellies—what will happen to those bellies? Would the children so conceived 'belong to Pakistan or Hindustan?'"
Toba Tek Singh By Saadat Hasan Manto
Not many people can describe the heart ache that followed the Partition. The Bombay-based writer Saadat Hasan Manto saw the creation of Pakistan as both a personal and a communal disaster. The tragedy of Partition, he wrote, was not that there were now two countries instead of one but the realization that “human beings in both countries were slaves, slaves of bigotry . . . slaves of religious passions, slaves of animal instincts and barbarity.”
Twilight in Delhi by Ahmed Ali
The book, published in 1940, with the support of Virginia Woolf and E. M. Forster is one of the best you can get your hands on to read about the Indian capital. An excerpt from his book: “The civilization of Delhi came into being through the mingling of two different cultures, Hindu and Muslim,” he told me. Now “Delhi is dead. . . . All that made Delhi special has been uprooted and dispersed.”
Autobiography of an Unknown Indian by Nirad C Chaudhury
Nirad G. Chaudhuri`s autobiography can easily fall under one of the classics of contemporary Indian literature. The book gives an analysis of twentieth-century historical trends as part of a personal story. The story starts from Calcutta, giving a background of the 19th-century Hindu revivalism of Swam Vivekananda that formed the roots of the chronic Hindu-Muslim antagonism that plagues Indian society even today. The author also offers penetrating insights into what he believes caused the partition of India in 1947.
The Great Partition by Yasmin Khan
The British scholar Yasmin Khan also has a different take on the uneventful period in Indian subcontinent's history. She writes that Partition “stands testament to the follies of empire, which ruptures community evolution, distorts historical trajectories and forces violent state formation from societies that would otherwise have taken different—and unknowable—paths.”
Liberty or Death by Patrick French
In his book, British historian Patrick French talks about Partition as a story of clash of personalities among the politicians of that period, particularly Muhammad Ali Jinnah, Mohandas Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru. The story emphasises on how all three were lawyers who received at least part of their education in England. Jinnah and Gandhi were both Gujarati and they could potentially be close allies but were not. Their relationship, in fact, worsened by the early nineteen-forties when they could barely be persuaded to sit in the same room.
Midnight’s Furies by Nisid Hajari
The book has a fast paced tone of urgency. It gives a new narrative of Partition and its aftermath, recounting chilling horrors of the time. An excerpt from the book: “Gangs of killers set whole villages aflame, hacking to death men and children and the aged while carrying off young women to be raped. Some British soldiers and journalists who had witnessed the Nazi death camps claimed Partition’s brutalities were worse: pregnant women had their breasts cut off and babies hacked out of their bellies; infants were found literally roasted on spits.”