Inheritors Of Partition
Radio 4 and BBC Sounds Monday 8 August, 9am
It is now five years since BBC journalist Kavita Puri’s Partition Voices was broadcast by Radio 4. Marking the 70th anniversary of the day when British India was divided into India and Pakistan, the series – and Puri’s book of the same name – tapped into a growing need among British South Asians to look back at events in 1947.
“Partition feels like a historical event from far away,” Puri says, “but there is a younger generation of British South Asians trying to piece together their family histories.”
Their efforts are explored in Inheritors of Partition, which follows some of the grandchildren of those who lived through Partition 75 years ago as they research their forebears’ experiences. These family histories, says Puri, touch on complex questions of identity, and became “part of a wider, urgent national conversation about how Britain remembers its colonial past following the Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2020”.
It helps here that, after years of silence, Partition began to be talked about more often in the wake of f 2017. But it remains s a painful subject because many still mourn lost homes and friends, and there re is a sense of shame about the violence and displacement that resulted.
“Those who came to Britain in the postwar years never had any counselling for post-traumatic stress – they would not even have had the vocabulary for that,” says Puri. “They were just trying to make a life here, and they were facing different battles in Britain – for equal pay and against racism. The 70th anniversary of Partition provided a public space for them to talk.”
Which isn’t to say that this is a series that deals only in trauma. Rather, this is a programme that reflects the richness of family histories, such as when one participant makes a new and surprising connection in the Pakistani village where Muslims saved his Hindu grandfather.
“The discoveries can change your sense of identity,” says Puri. “You may learn that the place where your family story started is not where you thought it was. And Partition cannot divide memories, histories and a shared culture of a time in undivided India. It is fascinating to see how this has been passed on through the generations.” • Bloomsbury published a revised edition of Kavita Puri’s book Partition Voices: Untold British Stories on 21 July (RRP £9.99).