Nineteen forty-seven: the year when India won independence and Pakistan was born. For a long time, the official version in both countries extolled the struggle for freedom that led to independence. One that involved people across classes, communities and castes and quite rightly—Gandhi’s role in it, and Jinnah’s too, who fought for the rights of Muslims and spoke eloquently on why Pakistan was necessary.

But there is another side to the story, another way of looking at it. Two new countries were formed, when its political leaders and people of certain provinces, of different religious communities, realised that they could no longer live amicably with each other. With independence in 1947, also came partition, the division of the country, with its own history, its own story of struggle.