Select Research Bibliography on the Partition of India

Compiled by Vinay Lal, Department of History, UCLA

I: Official and Semi-Official Documents:

A: The British Perspective

Campbell-Johnson, Alan. Mission with Mountbatten. London: Hale, 1982; reprinted, New York: Atheneum, 1986.

Mansergh, N.; Lumby, E. W. R.; and Moon, Penderel, eds. India: The Transfer of Power 1942-1947. 12 vols. London: HMSO, 1970-1983.

Moon, Penderel. Divide and Quit. Delhi: Oxford UP, 1998 [1961].

Philips, C. H. and Wainwright, M. D., eds. The Partition of India: Policies and Perspectives 1935-47. London: Allen and Unwin, 1970.

B: The Pakistani Perspective

Government of Pakistan. Disturbances in the Punjab 1947: A Compilation of Official Documents. Islamabad, 1995.

The Partition of Punjab: A Compilation of Official Documents. Lahore: Sang-e-Meel, 1993.

Pirzada, Syed Sharifuddin, ed. Foundations of Pakistan: All-India Muslim League Documents, 1906-1947. Karachi: National Publishing House, 1970. 2 vols. Volume 1: 1906-1924; Volume 2: 1924-1947.

West Punjab Government. Note on the Sikh Plan. Lahore: Superintendent, Government Printing, 1948.

West Punjab Government. RSS in the Punjab. Lahore: Superintendent, Government Printing, 1948.

West Punjab Government. The Sikhs in Action. Lahore: Superintendent, Government Printing, 1948.

C: The Indian Perspective

Chopra, P. N., ed. Towards Freedom: Documents on the Movement for Independence in India, 1937. Delhi: Oxford UP, 1986.

Gupta, P. S., ed. . Towards Freedom: Documents on the Movement for Independence in India, 1942-1944. Delhi: Oxford UP, 1997.

Menon, V. P. The Transfer of Power in India. Bombay: Orient Longman, 1957.

Singh, Kirpal, ed. Select Documents on Partition of Punjab — 1947, India and Pakistan. Delhi: National Bookshop, 1991.

Talib, G. S., ed. Muslim League Attack on Sikhs and Hindus in the Punjab 1947. New Delhi: SGPC, reprinted 1991.

D: Other Compilations of Official Records:

Sadullah, Mian Muhammad, compiler. The Partition of the Punjab 1947. Lahore: National Documentation Centre, 1983. 4 vols. Part II of Volume 1 contains the memoranda and representations submitted to the Punjab Boundary Commission by the Congress, Muslim League, the Sikhs, and others; Volume II contains the proceedings of the commission, or the oral arguments made before the commission; Volume III carries the reports of the members of the Commission, and Volume IV contains large-sized reproductions of maps. This is an indispensable collection.

II: History/Historiography

Ahmad, Aijaz. ” ‘Tryst with destiny’ — free but divided.” India (15 August 1997), Special Number, pp. 21-28.

Ahmed, Ishtiaq. “The 1947 Partition of India: A Paradigm for Pathological Politics in India and Pakistan”, Asian Ethnicity 3, no. 1 (March 2002).

Azad, Maulana Abul Kalam. India Wins Freedom. New Delhi: Orient Longman, 1959; new ed., 1988.

Bhattarcharjea, Ajit. Countdown to Partition: The Final Days. New Delhi: HarperCollins, 1998.

Brasted, H. V. and Bridge, Carl. “The Transfer of Power in South Asia: An Historiographical Review.” South Asia 17, no. 1 (1994), pp. 93-114.

Chatterji, Joya. Bengal Divided: Hindu Communalism and Partition, 1932-1947. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994.

Chatterji, Joya. “The Fashioning of a Frontier: The Radcliffe Line and Bengal’s Border Landscape, 1947-52.” Modern Asian Studies 33, no. 1 (1999), pp. 185-242.

Copland, I. “The Further Shores of Partition: Ethnic Cleansing in Rajasthan, 1947.” Past and Present, no. 160 (August 1998).

French, Patrick. Liberty or Death: India’s Journey to Independence and Division. London, 1997.

Gilmartin, David. Empire and Islam: Punjab and the Making of Pakistan. London: Oxford UP, 1988.

Guhathakurta, Meghna. “Understanding the Bengal Partition through reconstructing family histories: a Case Study”, Journal of Social Studies 76 (April 1997), pp. 57-65..

Hasan, Murhirul. Legacy of a Divided Nation: India’s Muslims Since Independence. New Delhi: Oxford, 1997.

Hasan, Mushirul. “Memories of a Fragmented Nation: Rewriting the Histories of India’s Partition.” Economic and Political Weekly 33, no. 41 (10 October 1998), pp. 2662-68. [Also included in Hasan, Inventing Boundaries {see below}, pp. 27-44]

Hasan, Mushirul, ed. India’s Partition: Process, Strategy and Mobilization. New Delhi: Oxford UP, 1993.

Hasan, Mushirul, ed. Inventing Boundaries: Gender, Politics and the Partition of India. Delhi: Oxford UP, 2000.

Hodson, H. V. The Great Divide: Britain-India-Pakistan. Karachi: Oxford UP, 1993 [1969].

Jalal, Ayesha. The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim League and the Demand for Pakistan. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985.

Jalal, Ayesha. “Conjuring Pakistan: History as Official Imagining.” International Journal of Middle East Studies 8, no. 4 (1974).

Jalal, Ayesha. “Secularists, Subalterns, and the Stigma of ‘Communalism’: Partition Historiography Revisited.” Indian Economic and Social History Review 33, no. 1 (1996), pp. 93-103.

Jalal, Ayesha. “Nation, Reason and Religion: Punjab’s Role in the Partition of India.” Economic and Political Weekly 33, no. 32 (8 August 1998), pp. 2183-90.

Jha, P. S. Kashmir, 1947: Rival Versions of History. Delhi: Oxford UP, 1996.

Khosla, G. D. Stern Reckoning: A Survey of the Events Leading Up to and following the Partition of India. New Delhi: Oxford, 1989 [1949].

Kumar, Ravinder, ed. “Partition Historiography: Some Reflections.” In India’s Partition, Prelude and Legacies, eds. Ramakand R. Mahan (Jaipur: Rawat, 1998).

Lamb, Alistair. Birth of a Tragedy: Kashmir 1947. Hertingfordbury: Roxford Books, 1994.

Lohia, Ram Manohar. Guilty Men of India’s Partition. Allahabad: Navahind, 1960.

Low, D. A. and Brasted, Howard, eds. Freedom, Trauma, Continuities: Northern India and Independence. New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1998.

Lumby, E. W. R. The Transfer of Power. London: Allen, 1954.

Mandelbaum, David G. “Hindu-Moslem Conflict in India”, The Middle East Journal 1, no. 4 (October 1947), pp. 369-385.

Michel, A. A. The Indus Rivers: A Study of the Effects of Partition. New Haven: Yale UP, 1967.

Moore, R. J. Escape from Empire: The Atlee Government and the Indian Problem. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1982.

Mosley, Leonard. The Last Days of the Raj. London, 1961.

Naim, C. M., ed. Iqbal, Jinnah and Pakistan: The Vision and the Reality. Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 1979.

Pandey, B. N. The Break-up of British India. London: Macmillan, 1969.

Pandey, Gyanendra. “The Prose of Otherness.” In David Arnold and David Hardiman (eds.), Subaltern Studies VIII: Essays in Honour of Ranajit Guha, pp. 188-221. Delhi: Oxford UP, 1994.

Samaddar, Ranabir, ed. Reflections on Partition in the East. New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House, 1997.

Sherwani, L. A. The Partition of India and Mountbatten. Karachi: Council for Pakistan Studies, 1986.

Singh, Anita Inder. The Origins of the Partition of India, 1936-1947. New Delhi: Oxford UP, 1987.

Talbot, Ian. Freedom’s Cry: The Popular Dimension in the Pakistan Movement and Partition Experience in Northwest India. Karachi: Oxford UP, 1996.

Talbot, Ian and Gurharpal Singh, eds. Region and Partition: Bengal, Punjab and the Partition of the Subcontinent. Karachi: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Tinker, Hugh. Experiment with Freedom, India and Pakistan 1947. London: Oxford UP, 1967.

Yong, Tan Tai and Kudaisya, Gyanesh. The Aftermath of Partition in South Asia. London: Routledge, 2000.

III: Fiction and Literary Studies

Bhalla, Alok. Stories about the Partition of India. 3 vols. New Delhi: HarperCollins, 1994.

Bhalla, Alok. The Life and Works of Saadat Hasan Manto. Simla: Indian Institute of Advanced Study, 1997.

Cowasjee, S. and Duggal, K. S., eds. Orphans of the Storm: Stories on the Partition of India. New Delhi: UBS Publishers, 1995.

Hasan, Murhirul, ed. India Partitioned: The Other Face of Freedom. 2 vols. New Delhi: Roli Books, 1995.

Manto, Saadat Hasan. Kingdom’s End and Other Stories. Trans. Khalid Hasan. Delhi: Penguin, 1987.

Manto, Saadat Hasan. Partition Sketches and Stories. New Delhi: Viking, 1991.

Manto, Saadat Hasan. Black Milk: A Collection of Short Stories. Trans. Hamid Jalal. Lahore: Sang-e-Meel Publications, 1997.

Memon, M. U. An Epic Unwritten: The Penguin Book of Partition Stories. New Delhi: Penguin, 1998.

Mufti, Aamir. “A Greater Story-writer than God: Genre, Gender and Minority in Late Colonial India”, in Subaltern Studies XI: Community, Gender and Violence, eds. Partha Chatterjee and Pradeep Jeganathan (Delhi: Permanent Black; New York: Columbia UP, 2000), pp. 2-36.

Rai, Alok. “The Trauma of Independence: Some Aspects of Progressive Hindi Literature.” Journal of Arts and Ideas 6 (1984) [also included in Hasan, Inventing Boundaries, pp. 351-370].

Ravikant and Saint, Tarun K., eds. Translating Partition. New Delhi: Katha, 2001.

Sahni, Bhisham. Tamas [English tr.]. New Delhi: Penguin, 1988.

Singh, Khushwant. Train to Pakistan. London: Chatto and Windus, 1956.

IV: Victims and their Voices; Memoirs; Eyewitnesses

Anand, Som. Lahore: Portrait of a Lost City. Lahore: Vanguard Books, 1998.

Bourke-White, Margaret. Halfway to Freedom: A Report on the New India in the Words and Photos of Margaret Bourke-White. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1949.

Butalia, Urvashi. “Blood.” Granta, no. 57 (Spring 1997), pp. 13-22.

Butalia, Urvashi, ed. The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India. New Delhi: Penguin, 1998.

“Freedom.” Photographs by Sanjeev Saith. Granta, no. 57 (Spring 1997), pp. 23-38.

Kidwai, Begum A. Azadi ki Chhaon Main. Delhi: National Book Trust, 1990.

Nandy, Ashis. “The Death of an Empire.” Persimmon

Nevile, P. Lahore: A Sentimental Journey. New Delhi: Penguin, 1993.

Salim, Ahmad. Lahore 1947. New Delhi: India Research Press, 2001.

V: Sociology, Psychology, Politics, Critical and Cultural Studies

Alam, Javeed and Sharma, Suresh. “Remembering Partition.” Seminar, no. 461 (1998).

Alter, Stephen. Amritsar to Lahore: A Journey Across the India-Pakistan Border. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001.

Chakrabarti, Prafulla. The Marginal Men The Refugees and the Left — Political Experiment in West Bengal. Calcutta: Lumiere, 1990.

Chaudhary, M. Partition and the Curse of Rehabilitation. Calcutta: Bengal Rehabilitation Organization, 1964.

Das, Veena. “National Honour and Practical Kinship: Of Unwanted Women and Children.” In her Critical Events: An Anthropological Perspective on Contemporary India, pp. 55-84. New Delhi: Oxford UP, 1995.

Das, Veena and Nandy, Ashis. “Violence, Victimhood and the Language of Silence.” In Veena Das (ed)., The Word and the World: Fantasy, Symbol and Record. New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1986.

Kalra, Virinder S. and Purewal, Navtej K. “The Strut of the Peacocks: Partition, Travel and the Indo-Pak Border.” In Travel Worlds: Journeys in Contemporary Cultural Politics, eds. Raminder Kaur and John Hutnyk (London: Zed Press, 1999), pp. 54-67.

Menon, Ritu and Bhasin, Kamla. Borders and Boundaries: Women in India’s Partition. New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1998.

Nandy, Ashis. “The Invisible Holocaust and the Journey as an Exodus.” Postcolonial Studies 2, no. 3 (1999).

Randhawa, M.S. Out of the Ashes: An Account of the Rehabilitation of Refugees from West Pakistan in Rural Areas of East Punjab. Bombay, 1954.

Sen, Geeti (ed.). Crossing Boundaries. Delhi: Indian International Centre, 1997. [First published as a theme issue of the India International Centre Quarterly.]

VI: Special Journal Issues on the Partition:

Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, Vol. 1, no. 2 (1999): Special Topic, “The Partition of the Indian Sub-Continent”, edited by Ritu Menon.

South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, vol. 18 (1995), Special issue, “North India: Partition and Independence”.

History Today 47, no. 9 (September 1997).