Witnessing Partition is a big book, in that it deals with a very wide range of Partition literature in chapters that are arranged chronologically and attentive to trends in historical scholarship since 1947. Since there were no trials for the incredible violence that occurred, Tarun Saint sees Partition literature perform the work of testimony. For Saint, ‘the attempt to aspire to a form of proxy witnessing may be discerned as an ethical imperative’ in the best writing on the Partition (55): however, it is in characterizing writing as best or mediocre that the book raises important questions on the function of literature, especially the genre that is Partition literature.



