Nadim and His Partition Poetry

The partition of India in 1947, which witnessed enormous bloodshed in the name of religion and is described by Salman Rushdie (1997) as ‘something of colossally horrible proportions’ and ‘one of the century’s great tragedies’, has been one of the most debated historical events in contemporary times. The historian Mushirul Hasan characterises it as ‘a complex and convoluted tragedy’ which ‘cast its lengthy shadows on two generations’ and marked ‘the break-up of centuries old social order in which communities lived in mutual co-existence’.