Singh Train to Pakistan Reading Order

Khushwant Singh's Train to Pakistan (1956) is the most widely read literary account of the Partition of India in 1947 — the event in which the British Indian Empire was divided into the independent nations of India and Pakistan, producing what may be the largest forced migration in human history: between ten and twenty million people displaced and between one and two million killed in religious violence within weeks. Singh set the novel in the fictional border village of Mano Majra, where Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs have lived together for generations, and 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 center. It is a short novel of enormous power, written with great directness.