Walking the Divide: A Tale of a Journey Home
In 1947, at the time of the Partition of India, Europe was still in the grip of the aftereffects of World War Two, preoccupied with the unfolding horrors of the Nazi Holocaust and with attempts to stabilise countries that had been damaged by the hostilities. Consequently, the problems besetting India seemed very far away.
In this beautifully constructed novel, its writer, Halima Khan, begins gently, introducing us to characters and lifestyles that will soon be brutally shattered when vast numbers of people are dispossessed by the partition of their country. Their traditions, personal status in society, lands, finances, inheritances, family achievements and ambitions are all about to be swept away.
We begin to focus on one family, particularly the younger generation, among which three teenaged brothers are approaching university education. Although considered “privileged”, their upbringing had also taught them humility and responsibility.
With Lord Louis Mountbatten’s announcement, the existing friction across India hardened. The family of Syed Sarder Ahmed, the eldest of the three brothers, takes the central role in the narration, and it is mainly through Syed’s eyes and heart that we learn of the carnage which follows when the friction between Muslims and Hindus erupts into barbaric massacres perpetrated on fleeing hordes who found themselves where they should no longer be. By the time a sort of order was restored, many thousands had died horribly and cultures and artefacts had been destroyed.
The novel ends with a collection of family photographs of the characters we have been following and their very few surviving descendants. Turning those last pages is a harrowing experience, rather akin to reading the facts of Anne Frank’s account of her experience.
Walking The Divide is excellently told. A beguiling, unsentimental glimpse of one of the darker stories in modern history.
