Our recorded history is not the history of the masses, it is not the history of our peasants, laborers, brick-klin workers, blacksmiths, bakers, stone-crushers, road-builders, clerks and daily-wage earners; nor is it the history of revolutionaries, peats, musicians, painters, sculptors and intellectuals. Hence, it is neither the history of the whole mankind nor the collective flow of life.

History needs to be re-written and we need to correct false information. In order to cover their mistakes and wrongdoings the ruling elite produced false narratives. We need to re-write history based on people’s perspective; particularly our literature on Partition needs to be re-written and re-visited. In re-writing history from people’s perspective we must be valiant in terms of ideology, doctrine, and prejudice. Let our generations know the real truth rather than a single, officially ordained, sanitized truth.

Many Hindus and Sikhs saved the lives of their Muslim neighbors and friends, even at times saved lives of Muslims they did not even know. Similarly many Muslims saved the lives of their Hindu and Sikh friends and neighbors. There are many stories about members of religious minorities, Christians, Parsis, Baharis, who saved the lives of Muslims in India and Hindus and Sikhs in Pakistan our history of Partition is riddled with prejudice, inconsistencies and huge knowledge gaps, in which the element of humanism is ignored, this missing link must be considered and people’s oral accounts should be recorded.

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       RECONSTRUCTING
                 HISTORY
Memories, Migrants and Minorities

There has been a growing scholarly interest in the human dimension to communal conflicts in South Asia, such activities and scholars as Veena Das, Urvashi Butalia and Ritu Menon have given voice to the previously silenced victims of riots as well as of the great upheaval which accompanied the 1947 partition of the subcontinent, Indeed one of the main academic achievements of the past two decades has been the creation of what has been termed a ‘new history’ of partition. This has sought to uncover the experience of the ‘subaltern’ groups both in the name of justice and to interrogate national and community discourses which have been driven by the aims of either obfuscating the human costs of the subcontinent’s freedom and division, of to apportion blame to the demonized ‘other’ community.
This volume which has been produced under the auspices of the Sustainable Development Policy Institute (SDPI) Islamabad represents a further contribution to the burgeoning study of the history from below of partition. It goes beyond this to examine the human dimension of 1971 Bangladesh war and of the position of minorities in west Pakistan. A voice is given to previously silenced groups through a series of interviews which were recorded by Ahmad Salim in India. Pakistan and Bangladesh.

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