Who among the following is the author of the famous partition narrative, The Other Side of Silence?

Correct — B, Urvashi Butalia. The Other Side of Silence, published in 1998 and subtitled Voices from the Partition of India, is a work of oral history rather than fiction. Butalia interviewed survivors over several years and built the book around what official histories had left out — the experience of women, of children and of the so-called untouchable castes, including abduction, recovery operations and killings within families. She is also the publisher who co-founded Kali for Women in 1984, India's first feminist press, and later Zubaan, and she was awarded the Padma Shri in 2011. The other three names are all writers of Partition, but of Partition fiction and poetry.

• (a)Amrita Pritam — Amrita Pritam wrote about Partition in Punjabi, most famously in the poem addressed to Waris Shah and in the novel Pinjar of 1950. Her work is literature rather than the collected testimony that this title consists of.
• (c)Saadat Hasan Manto — Saadat Hasan Manto is the great Urdu short-story writer of Partition, whose Toba Tek Singh and Khol Do are the standard reference points, but he died in 1955 and wrote fiction, not oral history.
• (d)Manju Kapur — Manju Kapur's Difficult Daughters, also published in 1998, is a novel set against Partition and won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for the Eurasia region. A novel of the same year is a plausible decoy, but it is not this book.

Partition writing divides into two broad kinds. One is imaginative — Manto's stories, Amrita Pritam's poetry and fiction, Khushwant Singh's Train to Pakistan, Bhisham Sahni's Tamas. The other is testimonial and historical, built from interviews conducted decades later, and The Other Side of Silence belongs to that second kind, alongside Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin's Borders and Boundaries.

This is a straight author-to-title item, and the reliable way to hold it is by the kind of book rather than by the title alone. Three of the four names here are known for imaginative writing about 1947; one is known as a historian and publisher. That single distinction picks out the answer even if the title is unfamiliar. The book's own argument is worth knowing for its own sake, because it changed what Partition history looked at: the number of women abducted and later recovered by the two states, often against their own wishes, and the violence done within families to prevent abduction, were treated as marginal until oral history made them central.

• The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India was published in 1998.
• It is oral history, built on interviews with survivors, and centres on women, children and Dalit experience.
• Urvashi Butalia co-founded Kali for Women in 1984 and later Zubaan, and received the Padma Shri in 2011.
• Amrita Pritam's Pinjar of 1950 and her poem addressed to Waris Shah are the best-known Punjabi literary responses to Partition.
• Manto's Toba Tek Singh and Khol Do are the standard Urdu short stories of 1947; Manju Kapur's Difficult Daughters is a 1998 novel.

• Reaching for Manto or Amrita Pritam because they are the famous Partition names. Neither wrote this book.
• Being pulled by Difficult Daughters, published in the same year and also about Partition, but a novel.
• Treating the book as fiction. Its whole method is interview and testimony.

As an author-to-book match, as a question on who wrote a named Partition work, or through the distinction between Partition fiction and Partition history.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The short story 'Toba Tek Singh', set at the time of Partition, was written by

  • (a)Krishan Chander
  • (b)Saadat Hasan Manto
  • (c)Ismat Chughtai
  • (d)Rajinder Singh Bedi

  Answer(b) Saadat Hasan Manto — his best-known Partition story, about the exchange of inmates of a lunatic asylum.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The novel Pinjar, set against the violence of 1947, was written by

  • (a)Amrita Pritam
  • (b)Urvashi Butalia
  • (c)Qurratulain Hyder
  • (d)Attia Hosain

  Answer(a) Amrita Pritam — published in Punjabi in 1950 and later filmed.