We are not in a court of law and witnessing a trial being in progress, where a witness is the most essential part of the legal process. An eye witness, who has gone through the horrendous experience of seeing such barbaric acts, may not in fact be able to depict and describe such crimes sufficiently for the purpose. Nevertheless, while Partition literature may not ‘bear witness to the events of 1947 in the same way as eyewitness accounts’ works of Yashpal and Manto on the subject to my mind, done full justice, with authenticity and historicity to this great tragedy.

The series while good overall, was incredibly dubious with regard to its depiction of communists. Since Bhism and Balraj were sympathetic to the party, Bhism presented it in good light.

My favorite film on partition actually has nothing to do with the event, but has everything to do with it. The film ‘Mammo’ was a Shyam Benegal masterpiece. It is the second part of the trilogy which began with Sardari Begum and ended with Zubeida. Khalid Mohd wrote it and it is largely autobiographical. The Gulzar song from Mammo remains a masterpiece.

What is the archive for the historian: There were no trials for perpetrators of violence, the authorities took no statements, and very little data was gathered – either of migrated families or on recompense (land holdings may give some clue). There are no physical remainders left. Even the trains which ran covered in blood across the Punjab border were scrubbed clean. The houses were destroyed. Street names changed. Physical traces obliterated. In fact, the only physical traces left are the people themselves. And they too shucked their old identities for fear of more violence. Hence, while there are newspaper reports (and newsreel footage) and scattered personal memoirs, but very few eye witness accounts, esp. those written or published at the time. So, it is easy to see why historians ceded the space, immediately, to poets and writers and by the time they re-entered the foray, the best one could hope for was Bhatalia style oral-history.

Two recent books attempt to do more. Yasmin Khan’s 2007 book, The great Partition: the making of India and Pakistan, doesn’t leave the colonial archive but does attempt some synthesis. It leads up to 1947 but then skips over to present. Vazira Zamindar’s The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia much more successfully blends familial memory to official archives, begins in 1947 and continues to the mid-50s. So it is possible, in the fourth generation, start a historiographic project to produce micro-and macro histories of the Partition. Can they deal w/ the pain or even the violence of the event itself? That I am not sure about.