The essays in this book suggest ways in which the tangled skein of Partition might be unravelled. Two of them deal with culture and history in what is now a part of Pakistan. Other contributors range over issues as diverse as literary reactions to Partition; the relief and rehabilitation measures provided to Partition refugees; and the Dalit claim, at the prospect of Partition, to a political community differentiating them from caste-Hindus. The power of 'national' monuments to evoke a historical past and the power of letters to evoke more immediately poignant pasts, are themes in some of the other essays. Imaginatively written and grounded in painstaking scholarship, this is a collection for all interested in their own histories.