India Wins Freedom: The Complete Version
Maulana Abul Kalam Azad
Vanguard Books
One of the makers of modern India tells the story of the partition of India as never before, with intimate knowledge and feeling. India Wins Freedom has at last won its own freedom. The full text of this autobiographical narrative was confined, under seal, in the National Library, Calcutta, and in the National Archives, New Delhi, for thirty years. What we now have is the complete text, released in September 1988, by a court directive. Not only have all the words and phrases of the original been reproduced, the original tone and temper have been fully restored. The text now reveals that the controversy that has simmered for so long about the hitherto unpublished pages, was fully justified.
Maulana Azad was an Indian scholar, activist and a senior leader of the Indian National Congress during the Indian independence movement.
Jinnah: Myth and Reality
Yasser Latif Hamdani
Vanguard Books (2012)
This book is not a biography, it is the author’s view of why Jinnah hailed as the best ambassador of Hindu-Muslim Unity ended up making a separate state in the subcontinent and what his views were on the future shape of Pakistan. Was Pakistan going to be a democratic state? What would be the role of religion in Pakistan? Was Pakistan the consequence of a millennial in stone or was it merely a counter-argument? The author attempts to answer these questions in the present work.
Yasser Latif Hamdani is a practicing lawyer based in Lahore. He studied economics and political science at Rutgers University in New Jersey, USA.
The Miraculous True History of Nomi Ali
Uzma Aslam Khan
Westland Books (2019)
Nomi and Zee are Local Borns—their father a convict condemned by the British to the Andaman Islands, their mother shipped off with him. The islands are an inhospitable place, despite their surreal beauty. In this unreliable world, the children have their friend Aye, the pet hen Priya and the distracted love of their parents to shore them up from one day to the next. Meanwhile, within the walls of the prison, Prisoner 218 D wages a war on her jailers with only her body and her memory.
When war descends upon this overlooked outpost of Empire, the British are forced out and the Japanese move in. Soon the first shot is fired and Zee is forced to flee, leaving Nomi and the other islanders to contend with a new malice. The islands—and the seas surrounding them—become a battlefield, resulting in tragedy for some and a brittle kind of freedom for others, who find themselves increasingly entangled in a mesh of alliances and betrayals.
Uzma Aslam Khan was born in Lahore and grew up in Karachi, Pakistan. She is the author of five novels, including Trespassing, The Geometry of God, Thinner than Skin, and, most recently, The Miraculous True History of Nomi Ali. Trespassing was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Prize Eurasia 2003. The Geometry of God was voted one of Kirkus Reviews’ Best Books of 2009 and won a bronze medal in the Independent Publisher Book Awards 2010. Thinner than Skin was longlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize 2012 and the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature 2014. Her novels have been translated worldwide, including in Romania, Brazil, France, Spain, Italy, Serbia, Norway, and Sweden.
Muslims against the Muslim League
Ali Usman Qasmi, Megan Eaton Robb
Cambridge University Press (2017)
The popularity of the Muslim League and its idea of Pakistan has been measured in terms of its success in achieving the goal of a sovereign state in the Muslim majority regions of North West and North East India. It led to an oversight of Muslim leaders and organizations which were opposed to this demand, predicating their opposition to the League on its understanding of the history and ideological content of the Muslim nation. This volume takes stock of multiple narratives about Muslim identity formation in the context of debates about partition, historicizes those narratives, and reads them in the light of the larger political milieu of the period. Focusing on the critiques of the Muslim League, its concept of the Muslim nation, and the political settlement demanded on its behalf, it studies how the movement for Pakistan inspired a contentious, influential conversation on the definition of the Muslim nation.
Ali Usman Qasmi is Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the Lahore University of Management Sciences, Pakistan. He is the author of Questioning the Authority of the Past: The Ahl al-Qur’an Movements in the Punjab (2012) and The Ahmadis and the Politics of Religious Exclusion in Pakistan (2015).
World powers and the 1971 breakup of Pakistan
K.K. Aziz
Vanguard Books (2016)
Most people have a vague idea that in the months leading to the 1971 breakup of Pakistan and during the savage military action in East Pakistan all the major world powers (except China, which couldn’t do anything) were severely critical of Pakistan’s policies and decisions. For the first time, this book chronicles and records this hostility precisely, punctiliously and extensively.
For this purpose Professor Aziz has consulted an incredibly enormous range of source material: 152 newspapers and magazines, 155 journal articles, 133 books, and several unpublished radio and TV broadcast transcripts.
The focus is on the United States, the United Kingdom and the USSR, with a brief look at the rest of the world. A detailed chapter de-scribes the making and implications of the lethal Indo-Soviet Treaty. The brief but explosive prologue is a novel and damaging expose of the unpardonable mistakes made by the All India Muslim League leadership between 1906 and 1947 which, irrevocably and inevitably, led to the creation of Bangladesh. This investigation is based on original and contemporary documents. To put the foreign comments in their context, the more relevant portions of the Hamood-ur-Rahman Commission Report are reproduced in an appendix.
This book is a register of events, a narrative of public opinion and an account of how the world powers saw and judged the developments of 1970-71. It is a collection of stark and brutal facts and comments upon them. It is not a work of analysis or judgment because Pakistani scholars are denied the freedom of expression essential for that exercise.
As most of the material used here is available in Pakistan but not all of it at one place anywhere, this volume is a valuable and indispensable source book for any study of the 1971 disaster.
K.K. Aziz has taught poetics, history, Islam and Asian studies for 50 years at various institutions. In Pakistan, he has served as deputy official historian to the federal government, chairman of the National Commission on Cultural Research, and Special Policy Advisor to the Prime Minister. In 1997, he was elected to the coveted Aziz Ahmad Memorial lectureship at the University of Toronto. Author of 32 scholarly works, he commands an international reputation as a political scientist, historian and general lecturer.