Silence In India’s Partition

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Silence in India’s Partition I was eight years old, living in Lahore in March of 1947, when the British Empire in India started to collapse. Along with talks of India’s independence from Britain came rumblings about its division into two countries: Pakistan and India. Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs, who had lived together as one entity for centuries, suddenly started to clamor for pieces of India for themselves. The arbitrary line of division the British would draw to carve up India in August of 1947 would scar the subcontinent forever. --From Film EARTH INTRODUCTION Earth is an independent feature film by a Canadian-Indian filmmaker Deepa Mehta. It opens and closes with the voice of grown-up Lenny narrating from her experiences as an eight-year-old girl and taking the viewer back to March 1947 to Lahore, India, several months before the partition of India made Lahore part of Pakistan. The partition of India and Pakistan in 1947 is a bloody underside of independence, also a signal event in world history. It has long been a subject of contentious debates among scholars of South Asia. Historian Urvashi Butalia provided radically understandings of partition for current conflicts and peace in her book, The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India. In the beginning of her book, she mentions that “The political partition of India caused one of the great human convulsions of history. Never before or since have so many people exchanged their homes and countries so quickly. In the space of a few months, about twelve million people moved between the new, truncated India and the two wings, East and West, of the newly created Pakistan.” (Urvashi) She also tells the tragedy of partition through the lives of those affected most by women and
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