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Train to Pakistan
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Indian Summer: The Secret History of the End of an Empire
The stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947, liberated 400 million people from the British Empire. With the loss of India, its greatest colony, Britain ceased to be a superpower, and its king ceased to sign himself Rex Imperator. This defining moment of world history had been brought about by a handful of people. Among them were Jawaharlal Nehru, the fiery Indian prime minister; Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the leader of the new Islamic Republic of Pakistan; Mohandas Gandhi, the mystical figure who enthralled a nation; and Louis and Edwina Mountbatten, the glamorous but unlikely couple who had been dispatched to get Britain out of India. Within hours of the midnight chimes, their dreams of freedom and democracy would turn to chaos, bloodshed, and war.
Behind the scenes, a secret personal drama was also unfolding, as Edwina Mountbatten and Jawaharlal Nehru began a passionate love affair. Their romance developed alongside Cold War conspiracies, the beginning of a terrible conflict in Kashmir, and an epic sweep of events that saw one million people killed and ten million dispossessed.
Steeped in the private papers and reflections of the participants, Indian Summer reveals, in vivid, exhilarating detail, how the actions of a few extraordinary people changed the lives of millions and determined the fate of nations.
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Price: $14.99
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The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan
The Partition of India in 1947 promised its people both political and religious freedom—through the liberation of India from British rule, and the creation of the Muslim state of Pakistan. Instead, the geographical divide brought displacement and death, and it benefited the few at the expense of the very many. Thousands of women were raped, at least one million people were killed, and ten to fifteen million were forced to leave their homes as refugees. One of the first events of decolonization in the twentieth century, Partition was also one of the most bloody. In this book Yasmin Khan examines the context, execution, and aftermath of Partition, weaving together local politics and ordinary lives with the larger political forces at play. She exposes the widespread obliviousness to what Partition would entail in practice and how it would affect the populace. Drawing together fresh information from an array of sources, Khan underscores the catastrophic human cost and shows why the repercussions of Partition resound even now, some sixty years later. The book is an intelligent and timely analysis of Partition, the haste and recklessness with which it was completed, and the damaging legacy left in its wake. .
Price: $14.94
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The Key to Zion (Zion Chronicles)
The Zion Chronicles series covers the events surrounding Israel's statehood in 1948. Each book vividly portrays the intense struggle of the Jewish people in the aftermath of the Holocaust and the forces, within and without, which engulf the Middle East in conflict and controversy even today. Will there ever be peace in Zion? The Jewish people wonder as they stream into the British Mandate of Palestine after the devastation of World War II. What has happened to God's promises to their nation? These updated classics feature a new look and added study questions suitable for individual use or group discussion..
Price: $8.41
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The Gates of Zion (Zion Chronicles)
The Zion Chronicles series covers the events surrounding Israel's statehood in 1948. Each book vividly portrays the intense struggle of the Jewish people in the aftermath of the Holocaust and the forces, within and without, which engulf the Middle East in conflict and controversy even today. Will there ever be peace in Zion? The Jewish people wonder as they stream into the British Mandate of Palestine after the devastation of World War II. What has happened to God's promises to their nation? These updated classics feature a new look and added study questions suitable for individual use or group discussion..
Price: $8.03
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The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India
The partition of India into two countries, India and Pakistan, caused one of the most massive human convulsions in history Within the space of two months in 1947 more than twelve million people were displaced A million died. More than seventy-five thousand women were abducted and raped. Countless children disappeared. Homes, villages, communities, families, and relationships were destroyed. Yet, more than half a century later, little is known of the human dimensions of this event. In The Other Side of Silence , Urvashi Butalia fills this gap by placing people—their individual experiences, their private pain—at the center of this epochal event. Through interviews conducted over a ten-year period and an examination of diaries, letters, memoirs, and parliamentary documents, Butalia asks how people on the margins of history—children, women, ordinary people, the lower castes, the untouchables—have been affected by this upheaval. To understand how and why certain events become shrouded in silence, she traces facets of her own poignant and partition-scarred family history before investigating the stories of other people and their experiences of the effects of this violent disruption. Those whom she interviews reveal that, at least in private, the voices of partition have not been stilled and the bitterness remains. Throughout, Butalia reflects on difficult questions: what did community, caste, and gender have to do with the violence that accompanied partition? What was partition meant to achieve and what did it actually achieve? How, through unspeakable horrors, did the survivors go on? Believing that only by remembering and telling their stories can those affected begin the process of healing and forgetting, Butalia presents a sensitive and moving account of her quest to hear the painful truth behind the silence. .
Price: $14.95
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Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity (Divinations: Rereading Late Ancient Religion)
The historical separation between Judaism and Christianity is often figured as a clearly defined break of a single entity into two separate religions. Following this model, there would have been one religion known as Judaism before the birth of Christ, which then took on a hybrid identity. Even before its subsequent division, certain beliefs and practices of this composite would have been identifiable as Christian or Jewish.In Border Lines, however, Daniel Boyarin makes a striking case for a very different way of thinking about the historical development that is the partition of Judaeo-Christianity.
There were no characteristics or features that could be described as uniquely Jewish or Christian in late antiquity, Boyarin argues. Rather, Jesus-following Jews and Jews who did not follow Jesus lived on a cultural map in which beliefs, such as that in a second divine being, and practices, such as keeping kosher or maintaining the Sabbath, were widely and variably distributed. The ultimate distinctions between Judaism and Christianity were imposed from above by "border-makers," heresiologists anxious to construct a discrete identity for Christianity. By defining some beliefs and practices as Christian and others as Jewish or heretical, they moved ideas, behaviors, and people to one side or another of an artificial border--and, Boyarin significantly contends, invented the very notion of religion. .
Price: $22.45
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What the Body Remembers: A Novel
Shauna Singh Baldwin's What the Body Remembers begins and ends with rebirth--an apt metaphor, perhaps, for the tragedy of Indian partition that forms the backdrop for her story. Though politics overshadows the lives of all the characters, the heart of this first novel is in the home where Sardarji, a middle-aged Sikh engineer, has brought his new wife, 16-year-old Roop. The only problem is, his current wife, Satya, is less than thrilled about sharing hearth and husband. Satya's inability to bear a child has led to Sardarji's recent marriage, and this fact, combined with jealousy has turned her heart "black and dense as a stone within her." Her rival is not only 25 years younger, but of considerably lower social rank, and her husband's obvious infatuation with Roop rankles considerably: Can a young woman ever know his friends and laugh with them in that rueful way? How will a young woman know that he breathes deeply when he thinks too much, that he wipes his forehead in the cold heart of winter when the British settlement officer approaches to collect his yearly taxes? How can a young woman know how to manage his flour mill while he is hunting kakar with his English "superiors"? How will she know how to give orders that sound as if she is a mere mouth for his words? How will she know that his voice is angry with the servants only when he is tired or hungry? How can she understand that all his talk of logic and discipline in the English people's corridors and his writing in brown paper files about the great boons of irrigation engineering brought by the conquerors are belied by his donations to the freedom-fighting Akali party? The rift between the two wives widens when Roop gives birth, first to a daughter and then to a son, and both children are sent to Satya for rearing. Eventually the younger wife demands the ouster of the elder from the household, and Satya is sent away. But her spirit is not exiled entirely, and years later, when Roop and Sardarji find themselves swept up in the bloody partition of India and Pakistan, it is memories of the elder woman's strength and wisdom that Roop draws on to survive. Baldwin develops her characters' personalities and interactions against the backdrop of changing Anglo-Indian relations; sometimes the political bleeds into the personal, as the novel juxtaposes India's struggle for independence with the smaller outrages and betrayals Satya and Roop suffer at their husband's hands--and each other's. What the Body Remembers is a powerful combination of historical and domestic drama, marking a promising debut for Shauna Singh Baldwin. --Sheila Bright.
Price: $5.50
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