Includes bibliographical references (pages 193-218) and index.

"Wasn't it golden?" : remembering the lost home -- "My other mother" : separated and reconstructed families -- "This eight-year-old, he's too little" : children taking back control -- "The most awful thing I watched" : partition and the many meanings of violence -- "All trains stop there" : the icon of the death-train -- "I still dream of the Padma" : changing riverscapes of partition -- "The cause" : working through the memories of partition -- Conclusion: The vital importance of the word.

"This book brings together 'private' and 'public' forms of memory narratives of the 1947 Indian/Pakistani partition, by looking at both oral history testimonies and cultural representations of partition. Raychaudhuri will compare literary, cinematic, and artistic representations of partition with a body of oral history interviews in order to look at the ways in which the events of partition are remembered, re-interpreted, and reconstructed, the themes (home, family, violence, childhood, trains, and rivers) that are recycled in the narration, and the voices that remain elided. This will be one of the very first truly interdisciplinary studies of the cultural and memorial legacy of the 1947 Indian/Pakistani partition. While there have been a number of notable studies of oral histories of partition, there has been very little which seeks to compare the 'private' testimonies with 'public' forms of memorialization"--