An American Witness To India's Partition

This volume is a collection of Phillips Talbot's letters written between 1938 and 1950, on the buildup to the independence of India and Pakistan, and the early experiences of the new states. Talbot's letters and reports from the field, presented here in the original, include his first-hand observations on student life at Aligarh Muslim University, local life in a small Muslim community in Kashmir, a Vedic ashram in Lahore, Tagore's Shantiniketan, Gandhi's Sevagram, the Kodaikanal Ashram Fellowship, and Hindu and Muslim urban communities in Lahore and Bombay, and Afghanistan. For anybody wishing to get a ground-level view of South Asian society in its decisive decade, these letters from an American observer promise to be an enjoyable read.