Rating: 
Summary: A tale of modern-day horror and heroism
Review: This book was recommended to me by two retired U.S. Foreign Service officers who had served in the subcontinent. I had asked them for advice on background reading about India and Pakistan. It turned out to be one of the best books I've ever read; I can't think of a more dramatic ending. It also sheds light on recent events in other corners of the globe (former Yugoslavia, Rwanda). The only difficulty Western readers (like me) might encounter is the frequent use of local language; in future editions, a glossary of terms, and real-life names, might be helpful. But this didn't diminish the book's awesome power and universality.
Rating:
Summary: Fascinating story about troublesome years
Review: To get some insight on the people behind the muslim-sikh-hindu troubles in India and Pakistan, this is a must-read. It is a brilliant story told in a way that gives the reader an excellent inside on the human factor during the time of the separation and liberation of India and Pakistan. A stranger, a non-religious muslim who has spent most of his life in England, a modern thinker, comes to a small village on what was to be the border between Pakistan and India. In this village, sikhs and muslims live in peace. But in the world around them, the troubles start. In this small village, hell soon breaks loose. In the centre of it all is a young couple from different religions, whos fate together is made impossible from this sudden outbust of sectarianism on both sides. It's a marvellous book.
Rating:
Summary: Stunning.
Review: When the monsoon rains wash a whole village of massacred babies, men, and women down the swollen river and past a small, peaceful community on India's border with the newly created Pakistani state, the residents of the village are aghast. When whole trains of newly slaughtered Sikhs and Hindus, not a passenger still alive, start arriving in their village from Muslim Pakistan, they hastily cremate and bury the remains, then retire to the temple in shock. When their own Muslim friends from the village are forcibly evacuted to Pakistan on ten minutes notice, the villagers know that the fabric of their lives is changed forever.With the immediacy of an on-the-spot observer to these events of 1947 and the passion of a sensitive writer impelled to tell a story, Singh mourns the seemingly permanent loss of compassion and tolerance which accompanied the separation of the Indian subcontinent into Hindu/Sikh India and Muslim Pakistan. His novel, written less than ten years after some of the events which are chronicled here, is filled with vibrant and realistic characters sometimes forced to make impossible decisions, characters who reflect the horrors of religious intolerance, which flourished when artificial boundaries were set up to divide India by religions. The book cries out against the losses of civility, tolerance, and life itself. With his love story of a Sikh dacoit and a Muslim weaver's daughter, told within an elegaic portrait of peaceful village life suddenly altered by religious strife, Singh draws the reader into the world of Mano Majra and its contrasts. He peppers the narrative with manipulative and grasping government officials and police, and outside agitators preying on residents' insecurities. The small world he creates so vividly becomes a microcosm through which the reader gains knowledge of the wider issues. Most remarkably, Singh holds himself above the ethnic and religious fray, reflecting his equal abhorrence of the Muslim atrocities and the Sikh response, "For each Hindu or Sikh they kill, kill two Mussulmans." Singh, writing this book in 1956, dramatically foreshadows the violence which has continued in this area to the present day. He makes us feel the sadness and the permanent loss to all the participants on all sides of this tragic conflict.
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