ABSTRACT
The Partition of British India in 1947, with the creation of two nation-states-India and Pakistan-has been the bloodiest and most traumatic event in the history of this part of the world. Bloody, for the number of victims it caused, counting the dead and the displaced; and traumatic, for the suffering, social laceration and hate that followed, leaving an infected wound that has proved difficult to heal. It is generally accepted in Indian historiography that Partition was in no small measure caused by Muslim separatism, the political interests of the Muslim League and its leader Muhammad Ali Jinnah, Qa’id-e-‘azam (“supreme leader” of the Muslims) from the late 1930s. However the publication in 1985 of Ayesha Jalal’s book on Jinnah breathed new life into the “revisionist theory” that sees the events of 1947 more as the fruit of the intransigent policy of the Indian National Congress than of Muslim separatism (Roy 1993). It is not our intention to review the history of Partition, but only to reaffirm that the question is still foremost in people’s mind as we study how it is treated in literature and film.
