The novelist Bapsi Sidhwa and the historian and publisher Urvashi Butalia in discussion about Partition and its representation in historical writing and in literature. Bapsi Sidhwa was brought up in Lahore and drew on her memories of living through Partition in her novel Ice Candy Man (also known as Cracking India). Urvashi Butalia is a Delhi-based publisher and the author of the seminal work on women's experience of Partition, The Other Side of Silence. They both came in to a radio studio in Delhi in January 2000 - I spoke to them on an audio link from London.
A short radio version of this discussion was broadcast on the BBC World Service, and a slightly abridged transcript of the conversation was published in History Workshop Journal (no. 50, Autumn 2000, pp230-238) with the title 'History on the Line: Bapsi Sidhwa and Urvashi Butalia discuss the Partition of India'.
I am also posting below a short phone interview I conducted with Bapsi Sidhwa in April 1999 about Ice Candy Man / Cracking India and its adaptation by Deepa Mehta into the movie Earth.