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olliereads611's review against another edition
challenging
dark
emotional
sad
tense
medium-paced
4.25
alexisrt's review against another edition
The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India by Urvashi Butalia (2000)
red_magpie's review against another edition
3.0
A very hard read as there were so many painful stories.
swee_p's review against another edition
adventurous
dark
emotional
informative
reflective
sad
tense
medium-paced
4.0
eranehreads's review against another edition
challenging
dark
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informative
sad
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slow-paced
4.0
🌸💮🏵️ The Other Side of Silence 🏵️💮🌸
Know him as the brave one who fights against the enemy, lets his body be cut into a hundred pieces but never will he give up his faith.
The Other side of Silence by Urvashi Butalia is an attempt to bring out the side of the people who experienced partition of India and Pakistan alongwith several major incidents like the massacre of 1984 that made people across both the countries shiver with fear making them wonder how could a peaceful nation like ours be capable of showing such brutality and inhumane behaviour to their own people. This work attempts to bring out the voices of women, children and several other classes of society which were never heard only because of the lack of power and sometimes lack of medium.
To be frank, I jumped into this book without being mentally prepared for it. This was suggested to me by my close friend Naazi, and I thought it was a collection of stories based on the partition of India and Pakistan. Never had I thought that this book would be so heavy, full of emotions and the feelings of several people who were adversely affected by the division of our country. I was struggling a lot while going through this book because this was the first time I have read a book like this, so I won't say it's an easy-to-read book at all. Only dive in if you have prior experience reading memoirs and want to learn in depth about the situation that normal people were going through at the time of partition.
The book is primarily divided into eight sections, namely: beginnings, blood, facts, women, honour, children, margins, and memory. Each of these sections first presents to us how the writer got to know about them and then presents us with a few stories told by the survivors themselves. This book also emphasises whether bringing this harsh truth to light is right or not, whether people should be forced to tell what horrors they experienced, or should we let them stay silent and keep suffering internally. It also brings a major fact to the forefront: the violence caused in a peaceful community is always caused by some external forces or individuals who tend to pull out the dark side of ourselves in front by telling us facts that are straight out lies told just to make us rethink our beliefs and fight our own people, consequently destroying ourselves mentally and emotionally by inflicting damage on others physically.
The question still remains: why do people often forget that these kinds of situations are mostly created by external forces who clearly desire to destroy strong nations by introducing doubt in our minds, yet we continue to be manipulated by them, destroying everything that we have built over generations in just a few seconds?
Know him as the brave one who fights against the enemy, lets his body be cut into a hundred pieces but never will he give up his faith.
The Other side of Silence by Urvashi Butalia is an attempt to bring out the side of the people who experienced partition of India and Pakistan alongwith several major incidents like the massacre of 1984 that made people across both the countries shiver with fear making them wonder how could a peaceful nation like ours be capable of showing such brutality and inhumane behaviour to their own people. This work attempts to bring out the voices of women, children and several other classes of society which were never heard only because of the lack of power and sometimes lack of medium.
To be frank, I jumped into this book without being mentally prepared for it. This was suggested to me by my close friend Naazi, and I thought it was a collection of stories based on the partition of India and Pakistan. Never had I thought that this book would be so heavy, full of emotions and the feelings of several people who were adversely affected by the division of our country. I was struggling a lot while going through this book because this was the first time I have read a book like this, so I won't say it's an easy-to-read book at all. Only dive in if you have prior experience reading memoirs and want to learn in depth about the situation that normal people were going through at the time of partition.
The book is primarily divided into eight sections, namely: beginnings, blood, facts, women, honour, children, margins, and memory. Each of these sections first presents to us how the writer got to know about them and then presents us with a few stories told by the survivors themselves. This book also emphasises whether bringing this harsh truth to light is right or not, whether people should be forced to tell what horrors they experienced, or should we let them stay silent and keep suffering internally. It also brings a major fact to the forefront: the violence caused in a peaceful community is always caused by some external forces or individuals who tend to pull out the dark side of ourselves in front by telling us facts that are straight out lies told just to make us rethink our beliefs and fight our own people, consequently destroying ourselves mentally and emotionally by inflicting damage on others physically.
The question still remains: why do people often forget that these kinds of situations are mostly created by external forces who clearly desire to destroy strong nations by introducing doubt in our minds, yet we continue to be manipulated by them, destroying everything that we have built over generations in just a few seconds?