The Other Side of SilenceThe Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India

The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India is a 1998 book by Urvashi Butalia, the Delhi publisher and historian of Punjabi heritage, built from more than seventy interviews with survivors of the 1947 Partition. Where most histories of Partition follow leaders, parties and boundary commissions, Butalia records the people history left out: the women who were abducted or killed by their own families, the children who were lost, the Dalits whose suffering fit no national story, and the millions who crossed Punjab in fear and then kept silent about it for fifty years. The Goethe Institute has called it one of the most influential books in South Asian studies published in recent decades.

About the book

The book was published by Penguin India in 1998, with the American edition following from Duke University Press in 2000. Its roots lie in November 1984, when anti-Sikh violence in Delhi sent Butalia into the refugee camps as a relief volunteer. Again and again she heard Sikh survivors ask how such a thing could happen twice in a single lifetime, and the question turned her towards 1947, and towards her own family, which had fled Lahore for India in the Partition and rarely spoken of it. She had grown up hearing fragments of those stories and hardly taking them in; the camps taught her they belonged to her own time.

Butalia's method is oral history. Over years she sought out survivors, by then mostly in their sixties and seventies, and recorded what they remembered, on both sides of the new border and from Hindu, Sikh and Muslim families alike. The book is not a narrative of the politics of Partition: as its reviewers note, the decisions of Gandhi, Nehru, Jinnah or Mountbatten are largely absent. What fills it instead is the human dimension of the tragedy, and an accounting of its scale: around ten million Punjabis driven from their homes, a million dead by the estimates she cites, and some 75,000 women abducted, with no count kept of the children lost or the women raped.

What is The Other Side of Silence about?

It is about what the official record did not say. Separate chapters take up the experiences of women, of children and of Dalits, the three groups whose suffering, as the book's reviewers observe, other writers had given least attention. Women speak, often for the first time, about abduction, about being hidden, rescued or rejected, and about the violence done in the name of family honour. Others describe the long aftermath: the silence inside families, the stories told only in fragments, and how memory itself bends under shame, grief and the need to go on living.

Running through the book is its title question: why the silence? Butalia argues that Partition, like the Holocaust, is a living history, still present in the survivors who can be interviewed, yet neither India nor Pakistan built the monuments, museums or public reckonings that might have let that memory speak. The interviews are her counter-archive, gathered while the generation that lived through 1947 was still alive to give it.

Themes

Three themes hold the book together. The first is silence itself: not an absence of memory but a way families and nations managed unbearable memory, passing trauma down in whispers, warnings and things unsaid. The second is gender: the book insists that violence against women was not a side effect of Partition but central to how communities marked victory and defeat on each other's bodies, and that recovering women's own accounts changes what the event is understood to be. The third is history from below: by leaving out the famous names, Butalia shows how large events are actually lived, in trains and refugee columns, in villages emptied overnight, and in the choices of ordinary people who saved neighbours or betrayed them.

The author

Urvashi Butalia (born 1952) was born in Ambala into a family of Punjabi heritage, studied literature at Delhi University and South Asian studies at the University of London, and speaks Punjabi among her several languages. With Ritu Menon she co-founded Kali for Women, India's first feminist publishing house, in 1984, and she founded Zubaan Books in 2003. Partition and oral history, read from a feminist perspective, are her central subjects. Her full life and work are told in her people entry in this Kosh, created together with this page.

Reception and legacy

The book was a bestseller in India, staying at the top of the bestseller list for over six months, and it has been used as a text in Indian universities. It won the Oral History Book Association Award in 2001 and the Nikkei Asia Prize for Culture in 2003. The Heinrich Boll Stiftung calls it the most important work in South Asian history of the past two decades, and the Goethe Institute describes it as one of the most influential books in South Asian studies of recent decades, emphasising the role of violence against women in the collective experience of the tragedy. Its legacy is the field it helped create: Partition studies now treats oral testimony, and women's testimony above all, as evidence no history can do without, and families across Punjab and the diaspora still read it to hear what their own grandparents could not say.