Singh Train to Pakistan

About Train to Pakistan

Khushwant Singh's Train to Pakistan (1956) is the most widely read literary account of the 1947 Partition of India — the event in which the British Indian Empire was divided into India and Pakistan, producing between one and two million deaths and ten to twenty million displaced persons within weeks. Set in the fictional border village of Mano Majra, where Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs have coexisted for generations, the novel traces the arrival of Partition's violence through the political calculations of a British administrator, an idealistic socialist, a police inspector, and a Sikh criminal named Juggut Singh who becomes the novel's unlikely moral hero. Short, direct, and devastating, it was published nine years after the events it describes and remains the essential novel of the Partition.