The year-old woman was the third victim in 18 months to be found dismembered with precision. At the request of President Jimmy Carter, the U. The action was in response to the Soviet military invasion of Afghanistan the previous month. Soon after the Bolsheviks seized control in immense, troubled Russia in November and moved towards negotiating peace with the Central Powers, the former Russian state of Ukraine declares its total independence.
The most decorated man of the war, American Lt. Audie Murphy, is wounded in France. Born the son of Texas sharecroppers on June 20, , Murphy served three years of active duty, beginning as a private, rising to the rank of staff sergeant, and finally winning a battlefield Live TV.
This Day In History. History Vault. Art, Literature, and Film History. World War II. Sign Up. Vietnam War. Westward Expansion. Cold War. World War I. Over the following centuries Islamic forces from the north took over large areas of the Indian subcontinent, which came to be ruled by competing dynasties, some Muslim, some Hindu. From the 15th century, the Islamic Mughal emperors arrived in India and created a certain amount of political unity.
The Mughals ruled over a population in India that was two-thirds Hindu, and the earlier spiritual teachings of the Vedic tradition remained influential in Indian values and philosophy. The early Mughal empire was a tolerant place. Unlike the preceding civilisations, the Mughals controlled a vast area of India. They were wealthy and politically powerful, renowned for building great palaces and monuments. But this wealth and power did not last for ever. The Mughal empire began to disintegrate. Tolerance waned, and wars overstretched its resources.
European traders contributed to the decline of the Mughal empire. European control of early modern India began with merchants establishing forts and factories along the periphery of this ancient dominion. The Portuguese arrived first, in Kerala in The first Dutch possession was on the Coromandel Coast and in the British entered the Asian trade, establishing a settlement at Surat in In the French established a settlement at Pondicherry.
As the Bombay Express pulled out of Lahore and began its journey south, the officials could see that Punjab was ablaze, with flames rising from village after village. What followed, especially in Punjab, the principal center of the violence, was one of the great human tragedies of the twentieth century. As the peasants trudged along wearily, mounted guerrillas burst out of the tall crops that lined the road and culled them like sheep.
Special refugee trains, filled to bursting when they set out, suffered repeated ambushes along the way. All too often they crossed the border in funereal silence, blood seeping from under their carriage doors. Within a few months, the landscape of South Asia had changed irrevocably. In , Karachi, designated the first capital of Pakistan, was Delhi, the capital of independent India, was one-third Muslim.
By the end of the decade, almost all the Hindus of Karachi had fled, while two hundred thousand Muslims had been forced out of Delhi. The changes made in a matter of months remain indelible seventy years later. More than twenty years ago, I visited the novelist Ahmed Ali. Forster, and is probably still the finest novel written about the Indian capital. Ali had grown up in the mixed world of old Delhi, but by the time I visited him he was living in exile in Karachi.
All that made Delhi special has been uprooted and dispersed. So many words are lost. Like Ali, the Bombay-based writer Saadat Hasan Manto saw the creation of Pakistan as both a personal and a communal disaster.
Yet it also transformed him into the supreme master of the Urdu short story. Before Partition, Manto was an essayist, screenwriter, and journalist of varying artistic attainment.
Afterward, during several years of frenzied creativity, he became an author worthy of comparison with Chekhov, Zola, and Maupassant—all of whom he translated and adopted as models. Although his work is still little known outside South Asia, a number of fine new translations—by Aatish Taseer, Matt Reeck, and Aftab Ahmad—promise to bring him a wider audience.
Although he faced criticism and censorship, he wrote obsessively about the sexual violence that accompanied Partition. Instead, he urges us to try to understand what is going on in the minds of all his characters, the murderers as well as the murdered, the rapists as well as the raped. As he tries to explain his affliction to Kalwant Kaur, his current lover, he tells the story of discovering the girl after breaking into a house and killing her family:.
I thought she had gone into a faint, so I carried her over my shoulder all the way to the canal which runs outside the city. Then I laid her down on the grass, behind some bushes and. Ishwar Singh opened his eyes.
I had carried a dead body. Two or three years after the Partition, it occurred to the governments of India and Pakistan to exchange their lunatics in the same manner as they had exchanged their criminals. The Muslim lunatics in India were to be sent over to Pakistan and the Hindu and Sikh lunatics in Pakistani asylums were to be handed over to India. It was difficult to say whether the proposal made any sense or not.
However, the decision had been taken at the topmost level on both sides. In between, on a bit of earth which had no name, lay Toba Tek Singh.
The need to earn a living forced Manto into a state of hyper-productivity; for a period in , he was writing a book a month, at the rate of one story a day. Under this stress, he fell into a depression and became an alcoholic. His family had him committed to a mental asylum in an attempt to curb his drinking, but he died of its effects in , at the age of forty-two. He opted to live in India, but at the moment when Partition was announced he happened to be at a military workshop on the Pakistan side of the border.
Within months, the two new countries were at war over Kashmir, and Ali was pressed into service by the Pakistani Army and prevented from returning to his home, in India. In , the Army discharged him on the ground that he had become a citizen of India. Yet when he got to the frontier he was not recognized as Indian, and was arrested for entering without a travel permit.
In , after serving a prison sentence in India, he was deported back to Pakistan. Six years later, he was still being deported back and forth, shuttling between the prisons and refugee camps of the two new states. His official file closes with the Muslim soldier under arrest in a camp for Hindu prisoners on the Pakistani side of the border.
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