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I read Moni Mohsin’s The End of Innocence at one sitting. This debut novel is a sensitive rendering of a childhood friendship between two young girls in Pakistan, from different social realms.

Of the many voices to come out of the subcontinent in the last century, Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s (1911-1984) is perhaps the strongest. He has been described as many things—the misunderstood Marxist, the compassionate humanist, an irresistible charmer and of course the revolutionary poet.

Curled in the end lies a beginning and in every beginning lies the end of something old. Never is this truer than in the case of countries that are born after prolonged periods of parturition or when they are hived out of old nation states after much blood has been shed.

Pichhwa the wrestler—a character from Intizar Husain’s classic An Unwritten Epic—a larger than life, fearless, action hero who has fended off a Jat attack on his UP village Qadirpur, receives the news of Pakistan’s formation with an ‘immense chill’.

The anthology edited by Smita Tewari Jassal and Eyal Ben-Ari brings together essays from varied disciplines including memory studies, social anthropology, sociology and literary criticism that come to terms with the partition motif in contemporary conflicts.

This is a welcome addition to the critical apparatus available on sub- continental English writers. South Asian writing is as usual an in- vention of the western academy, a convenient label that sub-continental critics can use to talk about issues that concern the nations of the region. However,