Thoughts on Partitions by Amit Majmudar

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A few years ago I taught a little bit about the partitioning of India and Pakistan. Not many students had actually heard of this event. This would be an excellent novel to introduce students to that event that continues to shape that part of the world. It is a great novel to read when thinking about the violence that is happening around the world. The book also goes into depth about violence against women in war zones and even the thoughts and motives of the perpetrators of such violence.  There were several parts where the author used such beautiful language to express something thoughtful and thought-provoking about humanity.  I will include two of them below:

The first example is when the traveling group of children and one adult hear the ominous sound of a vehicle motor behind them (they are on guard for violent people and human traffickers who travel with trucks):

"It isn't a truck, though.  It's a passenger bus. Masud [a main character who is a doctor and a Muslim] waves his arms, sensing as he did before, a detached kindness guiding the courses and intersections of people, which violent men try to disrupt but succeed in disrupting only for a time." (p.196)

When the doctor takes on a Sikh last name in order to work peacefully at a Sikh refugee camp, the author adds an interesting commentary.

"The false identity doesn't trouble him the way it would have just a day before, when he walked in the kafila and answered thoes who asked him with his given, Muslim name. He knows his caregiving is neither Muslim, nor Sikh, nor Hindu. Or rather it is all three of these. The name, on the man or on the God, is something around it, not of it--thinner than the gloves on his scrubbed hands and peeled off just as easily." (p. 200)

Majmudar, A. (2011). Partitions. NY: Picador