Partitions Reviewed By Lavanya Karthik Of Bookpleasures.com
http://www.bookpleasures.com/websitepublisher/articles/3636/1/Partitions-Reviewed-By-Lavanya-Karthik-Of-Bookpleasurescom/Page1.html
Lavanya Karthik
Reviewer
Lavanya Karthik: Lavanya is from Mumbai, India and is a licensed
architect and consultant in environmental management. She lives in
Mumbai with her husband and six-year old daughter. She loves reading
and enjoys a diverse range of authors across genres.
By Lavanya Karthik
Published on July 3, 2011
Publisher: Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt and Company
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9395-7
Click Here To Purchase Partitions: A Novel
Author: Amit Majmudar
Publisher: Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt and Company
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9395-7
With Partitions, Amit Majmudar revisits terrain well mapped by authors like Sadat Hasan Manto, Bhisham Saini and Khushwant Singh – the geopolitical division that carved the Muslim state of Pakistan out of India in 1947, and uprooted millions of people from their homes on both sides of this freshly drawn border. Evoking some of the most horrific images from that time – communal riots that turned neighbours on each other, trains brimming with slaughtered passengers , innocents burnt alive, women abducted, mutilated and raped – Partitions is at once disturbing and compelling as it charts the flight of four different characters towards safety, while communal violence erupts around them.
Keshav and Shankar, twin Hindu boys are abandoned on a crowded train and find themselves adrift in the great tide of refugees headed for India. They experience injury, abduction and several brushes with death, surviving on the random kindness of strangers and their own wits. Simran, a Sikh teenager survives the mass suicide of her family and attempts to make her way to the Sikh-dominated Indian city of Amritsar, only to be abducted by human traffickers. Across the border, aged physician Ibrahim Masud struggles to make sense of the carnage around him, as he slowly makes his way towards Pakistan.
Yet there is a fifth person here – Majmudar’s shadowy narrator. Dr. Roshan Jaitly, respected physician, unsuspecting cuckold and father to the boys has been dead five years, but finds himself now bearing witness to the ordeals of these four lives. He anguishes over their plight and his own helplessness. At other times, he reminisces over the life he has left behind - the beautiful woman he marries against his family’s wishes, his relations with his Hindu neighbours , the ties he builds with Muslim workmen, his children. “I am here because I am everywhere,” he says , becoming the disembodied voice of a nation - or two – under siege.
Majmudar’s prose is spare and elegant as he weaves between the individual narratives of his characters. It soon becomes apparent that the four are fated to meet , and Majmudar maintains the tension admirably as he draws us slowly toward the inevitable crossing of their paths . But perhaps he loves his creations too well, for serendipitous escapes and kind strangers seem to abound in the lives of these four innocents as they head for each other, and the warm, resolutely secular family you just know they are going to forge (their respective faiths can surely be no coincidence) . Also disappointing is the grim justice he metes out to the twins’ mother, an enigmatic character reduced in this narrative to a hapless and stereotypical ‘fallen woman’ .
Click Here To Purchase Partitions: A Novel
Author: Amit Majmudar
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9395-7
Click Here To Purchase Partitions: A Novel
Author: Amit Majmudar
Publisher: Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt and Company
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9395-7
With Partitions, Amit Majmudar revisits terrain well mapped by authors like Sadat Hasan Manto, Bhisham Saini and Khushwant Singh – the geopolitical division that carved the Muslim state of Pakistan out of India in 1947, and uprooted millions of people from their homes on both sides of this freshly drawn border. Evoking some of the most horrific images from that time – communal riots that turned neighbours on each other, trains brimming with slaughtered passengers , innocents burnt alive, women abducted, mutilated and raped – Partitions is at once disturbing and compelling as it charts the flight of four different characters towards safety, while communal violence erupts around them.
Keshav and Shankar, twin Hindu boys are abandoned on a crowded train and find themselves adrift in the great tide of refugees headed for India. They experience injury, abduction and several brushes with death, surviving on the random kindness of strangers and their own wits. Simran, a Sikh teenager survives the mass suicide of her family and attempts to make her way to the Sikh-dominated Indian city of Amritsar, only to be abducted by human traffickers. Across the border, aged physician Ibrahim Masud struggles to make sense of the carnage around him, as he slowly makes his way towards Pakistan.
Yet there is a fifth person here – Majmudar’s shadowy narrator. Dr. Roshan Jaitly, respected physician, unsuspecting cuckold and father to the boys has been dead five years, but finds himself now bearing witness to the ordeals of these four lives. He anguishes over their plight and his own helplessness. At other times, he reminisces over the life he has left behind - the beautiful woman he marries against his family’s wishes, his relations with his Hindu neighbours , the ties he builds with Muslim workmen, his children. “I am here because I am everywhere,” he says , becoming the disembodied voice of a nation - or two – under siege.
Majmudar’s prose is spare and elegant as he weaves between the individual narratives of his characters. It soon becomes apparent that the four are fated to meet , and Majmudar maintains the tension admirably as he draws us slowly toward the inevitable crossing of their paths . But perhaps he loves his creations too well, for serendipitous escapes and kind strangers seem to abound in the lives of these four innocents as they head for each other, and the warm, resolutely secular family you just know they are going to forge (their respective faiths can surely be no coincidence) . Also disappointing is the grim justice he metes out to the twins’ mother, an enigmatic character reduced in this narrative to a hapless and stereotypical ‘fallen woman’ .
Click Here To Purchase Partitions: A Novel