Changing India/Pakistan narrative

“India and Pakistan still define themselves in opposition to each other, claiming to be everything the other is not – more pious, righteous, secular, progressive than those across the border. Patriotism is more often than not based on hostility towards the other,” stresses Pakistani author Anam Zakaria, whose third book ‘1971’ (Penguin) will be released in India soon. See full article here.

New Pakistan Museum

The first-of-its-kind National History Museum, which opens to the public on July 1, recreates the struggles and sacrifices that led to the creation of Pakistan through interactive digital media and bespoke art installations.  For full story click here.

Partition of India and Pakistan in 1947

When Guneeta Singh Bhalla was 19 years old, her paternal grandmother Harbhajan Kaur sat her down at her home in New Jersey to relay a harrowing migration story.  The date was August 1947. The place, Lahore, a city in the northern state of Punjab, in what was once India, but what was now the new Muslim majority country of Pakistan. Almost overnight, Sikhs, Hindus, and Muslims who'd lived in Lahore for generations in peace turned on one another. Kaur, a Sikh, was forced to abandon her family estate and board a train with her three young children — ages four, three, and one — to Amritsar, a small city just inside the new border of India. For six months, she was separated from her husband. The dead bodies, the horrific violence she witnessed haunted her for the rest of her life.  Read full story with videos and links here.

Voices of Partition Survivors

Like many Indians and Pakistanis his age, 75-year-old Ravi Chopra remembers the shocking violence triggered by the countries’ moves toward independence.  “Nobody imagined that such a holocaust would take place,” Mr. Chopra, a retired Indian army officer, said in an interview with a U.S.-based oral history project dedicated to recording tales of partition, as the division of the subcontinent into India and Pakistan in 1947 is known.  For full story with links to website and video interviews, click here.