Few English-language writers have catalogued the real, lived experience of partition, that bloody historical watershed in 1947 when British rule came to an end in India but not before the Raj had carved up the land and redrawn boundaries that sparked communal violence and mass migration of epic proportions.
Salman Rushdie fictionalised it in Midnight’s Children, Hanif Kureishi wrote of it in his memoir of 2004, but then, on the 70th anniversary of Indian independence, the journalist and broadcaster Kavita Puri began an extraordinary oral project, recording the experiences of British Asians, many of whom had hitherto kept silent. That became the immensely moving BBC radio series Partition Voices, which in turn became a book of the same name. Now comes the play adapted by Sonali Bhattacharyya, Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti, Ishy Din and Alexandra Wood as a third incarnation of the project.
