But this does not necessarily invalidate the reality of the past. Indian official narratives in communal discourses may overlook informal and personal accounts of the facts of the partition history. I have reconstructed many different ‘voices’ of Partition: official, unofficial, informal, others. While interviews form my primary sources, I have also looked at diaries, memoirs, newspaper reports and the kinds of documents that I feel are important for my work: letters written by different people, reports of enquiry commissions, pamphlets and, of course, books.
Butalia, of course, categorically says that she has depended not only upon her interviews with common victims of the Indian partition but also upon other documentary evidence in delineating the indescribable sufferings of the people during and after the Indian partition in 1947. An individual’s way of looking at things and his assessment of the situation around him also help one to know the past.
An ordinary man’s perception of an event may also be the appropriate interpretation and explanation of historical facts. A history is not the history of kings and queens only. But at the same time, nobody can deny that a book on oral history gives the innermost feelings and realisation. In any book on oral history, exaggeration, subjective interpretation, personal inhibition, individual likes etc., play an important role. The primary source of this book is oral history. Urvashi Butalia’s The Other Side of Silence is a unique book on the history of the Indian partition. The second and concluding part of the column shall be released on Sunday. In the first part, he tells us that the primary source of the book is oral history and share with us the writer’s candid view on objectivity, in the weekly column, exclusively in Different Truths. Continuing with the literature on Indian Partition, Basudeb examines an important treatise, The Other Side of Silence, by Urvashi Butalia, in two parts.
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