ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to rescue the current debates on partition from the votaries of secular nationalism and their unrelenting critics, and to create space for other voices to be heard. The engagement is not with high politics or with the so-called guilty men of the 1940s, but with creative writers and poets. "At a conference in London in 1967, M.A.H. Ispahani boasted how after achieving their homeland Muslims received 'all the encouragement and opportunity to pull themselves up by the bootstraps and they did.' In short independence and partition brought varied moods of loneliness. Every individual in Gangauli 'had found himself suddenly alone'. With the intensive propaganda produced during the 1945-1946 elections, communal politics burst into the village, setting Muslim against non-Muslim and giving both communities a new and exciting word – freedom.
