THE LOST HOMESTEAD
MY MOTHER, PARTITION AND THE PUNJAB
MARINA WHEELER
Hodder & Stoughton, 336pp, £25
In 1962 the journalist Charles Wheeler married Dip, a 28-year-old Sikh woman. Dip came from a prosperous and philanthropic family from Sargodha near Lahore. When, at Partition, it fell to Pakistan, the family, like millions of others, lost everything in their traumatic escape to India. The Wheelers left Delhi shortly after they were married. Marina Wheeler QC is their daughter
and this is her first non-legal book. Dip could rarely be persuaded to speak about the past, saying she wanted to spare her children a ‘confused identity’.
At a difficult period of her own life, having undergone both cervical cancer and divorce from the Prime Minister (never mentioned by name), Marina Wheeler embarked on a quest to understand and explain her maternal heredity. The ‘Lost Homestead’ is her grandfather’s house and land in Sargodha. She never finds it, but she makes it stand for the tragic loss of a world more innocent and attractive than the militant nationalisms that were to succeed it. Nikhil Krishnan in the Daily
Telegraph thought the ‘early chapters are a little clunky, suggesting a writer adjusting to an unfamiliar form’, but found the later sections when Wheeler travels to India and Pakistan ‘more elegant’. In the Times Tanjil Rashid remarked that South Asians in Britain ‘typically aren’t told about’ the catastrophic events of Partition: ‘families pass over it in silence or denial’. Wheeler ‘resists the idea that “ancient hatreds” drove the split’, and her family story ‘made the abstractions of history suddenly more real’. Siddharth Venkataramakrishnan in the
Financial Times thought the book achieved its aim to explore ‘memory and identity, what we have, what we lose and what we rebuild’.