The Lost Homestead: My Mother, Partition and the Punjab by Marina Wheeler is an investigative story about India, Partition and its history. Through her mother's memories, accounts from her Indian family and her own research in both India and Pakistan, the author explores how the peoples of these new nations struggled to recover and rebuild their lives.
Rich in personal and political history, the book also deals with contemporary themes, including religious extremism, the controversial topic of providing reparation for colonial wrongs, migration and displacement. As a British-Indian with roots in what is now Pakistan, Marina attempts to untangle some of these threads to make sense of her own mother's experience, while weaving her family's story into the broader, still highly contested, history of the region. This is a story of loss and new beginnings, personal and political freedom. It touches on global themes that strongly resonate today — political change, religious extremism, migration, minorities, nationhood, identity and belonging. But, above all, it is about coming to terms with the past and about the stories we choose to tell about ourselves.
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