Author | Veera Hiranandani |
---|---|
Cover artist | Kelley Brady |
Language | English |
Set in | 1947, Pakistan / India |
Publisher | Penguin Random House |
Publication date | March 6, 2018 |
Pages | 272 |
Awards | 2019 Newbery Honor |
ISBN | 9780735228528 |
Website | Publisher's website |
The Night Diary is a young adult novel written by American writer Veera Hiranandani and published by Penguin Random House in 2018. It is set in 1947, during the months before and after the independence of India and subsequent division with Pakistan, and is written as diary entries from the perspective of Nisha, a girl who has just celebrated her twelfth birthday along with her twin brother, Amil.
Veera Hiranandani was raised in a small town in Connecticut. Her mother is Jewish-American and her father comes from a Hindu family in India. Hiranandani was raised in both cultures.
She has a Master's of Fine Arts in fiction writing from Sarah Lawrence College and spent six years as a book editor. She now teaches creative writing at The Writing Institute at Sarah Lawrence College and lives in New York with her family. She is working on her next novel.
The Night Diary is set around this time of partition and separated into two different countries. The story is told through the eyes of a 12-year-old, Nisha, the protagonist of the story. The novel opens on July 14, 1947; it is the twins' twelfth birthday, and to celebrate, their father has gifted Nisha another piece of gold jewelry from her mother's collection and given her brother Amil an illustrated book of tales from the Mahabharata . The day also marks the sad anniversary of their mother's death in childbirth. Aside from their father, a medical doctor, and the twins, the household includes their paternal grandmother, Dadi, and their cook, Kazi Syed; they live together in a compound in Mirpur Khas. The story takes place in West Pakistan soon to become Pakistan after East Pakistan becomes independent and known as Bangladesh
July 1947 is just a month before independence from the British Raj, and Nisha also receives a diary from Kazi, the family's cook, as a birthday gift. The Britishers were leaving and Half-Muslim, half-Hindu twelve-year-old Nisha doesn't know where she belongs, or what her country is anymore. As the impending partition of India along religious lines becomes inevitable following independence, the household is forced to divide (Kazi is Muslim) while the rest of the family identifies as Hindu, although the twins' mother (who was Muslim) moved to Jodhpur. When Papa decides it's too dangerous to stay in what is now Pakistan, Nisha and her family become refugees and embark first by train but later on foot to reach her new home. The journey is long, difficult, and dangerous, and after losing her mother as a baby, Nisha can't imagine losing her homeland, too. But even if her country has been ripped apart, Nisha still believes in the possibility of putting herself back together.
Even though fear and tension are on the rise, Nisha doesn't forget to write to her mother via the eponymous diary even in this chaos. The novel details their journey and hardships. She notes down altering landscape which she sees with her innocent eyes as the grief, confusion, tension, fear, anger, distress, and about the horrors of the reality. The story has been fictionalized as is mentioned by the author at the end of the book based on the real-life events that happened during the time of partition in 1947.
Hiranandani's father experienced Partition as a nine-year-old boy; although his journey was also from Mirpur Khas to Jodhpur, the specific experiences of Nisha and her family are fictionalized. [1]
Her family is an inspiration for her fiction writing. Her father was nine when he had to leave his home during the Partition. Hiranandani grew up hearing the real-life incidents of partition from her father, uncles, and aunts–that several weeks after India's Independence, her father, his four brothers and sisters, and his mother decided to leave Pakistan and made it over the new border by train. Her grandfather was a doctor by profession in the Mirpur Khas city hospital and he left behind up to find a replacement, but a few weeks after, he decided to leave anyway because he was worried about his family. They lost their and community to start a fresh life.
In addition, the scholars and Partition writings like Yasmin Khan's The Great Partition, Khushwant Singh's Train to Pakistan, Urvashi Butalia's The Other Side of Silence, Bapsi Sidhwa's Cracking India, Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, and Nisid Hajari's Midnight's Furies are inspiration for Veera Hiranandani's Partition fiction writing.
In 2019, the American Library Association named The Night Diary to its list of Newbery Honor winners, alongside Catherine Gilbert Murdock's The Book of Boy . [2]
The Night Diary (Kokila) also received the 2019 Walter Dean Myers Honor Award and the 2018 Malka Penn Award for Human Rights in Children's Literature.
The Partition of India in 1947 was the change of political borders and the division of other assets that accompanied the dissolution of the British Raj in the Indian subcontinent and the creation of two independent dominions in South Asia: India and Pakistan. The Dominion of India is today the Republic of India, and the Dominion of Pakistan—which at the time comprised two regions lying on either side of India—is now the Islamic Republic of Pakistan and the People's Republic of Bangladesh. The partition was outlined in the Indian Independence Act 1947. The change of political borders notably included the division of two provinces of British India, Bengal and Punjab. The majority Muslim districts in these provinces were awarded to Pakistan and the majority non-Muslim to India. The other assets that were divided included the British Indian Army, the Royal Indian Navy, the Royal Indian Air Force, the Indian Civil Service, the railways, and the central treasury. Provisions for self-governing independent Pakistan and India legally came into existence at midnight on 14 and 15 August 1947 respectively.
Mirpur Khas is a city in Sindh province, Pakistan. The city was built by Talpur rulers of Mankani branch. According to the 2017 Census of Pakistan, its population was 205,913. Mirpur Khas is known for its mango cultivation, with hundreds of varieties of the fruit produced each year - it is also called the “City of Mangoes,” and has been home to an annual mango festival since 1955. After the completion of Hyderabad-Mirpurkhas dual carriage way, the city has become hub of commercial activities.
Dina Wadia was the only child and daughter of Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the founding father of Pakistan, and Rattanbai Petit.
Qurratulain Hyder was an Indian Urdu novelist and short story writer, academic, and journalist. One of the most outstanding and influential literary names in Urdu literature, she is best known for her magnum opus, Aag Ka Darya, a novel first published in Urdu in 1959, from Lahore, Pakistan, that stretches from the fourth century BC to post partition of India.
The Thar Express was an international passenger train that ran between the Bhagat Ki Kothi a suburban area of Jodhpur in the Indian State of Rajasthan and Karachi Cantonment of Karachi in the Pakistani Province of Sindh. The name of the train is derived from the Thar Desert a sub-continental desert, which lies in the north-western part of the Indian subcontinent and ranks 17th in the world covering an area of 200,000 km2 (77,000 sq mi).
Khokhropar or Khokhrapar is a border town situated in Tharparkar District, Sindh, Pakistan. It is located at 25°41 North 70°12 East and has an altitude of 71 metres (233 ft).
The Partition of India and the associated bloody riots inspired many creative minds in the republics of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh to create literary/cinematic depictions of this event. While some creations depicted the massacres during the refugee migration, others concentrated on the aftermath of the partition in terms of difficulties faced by the refugees in both side of the border. Even now, more than 60 years after the partition, works of fiction and films are made that relate to the events of partition. W.H. Auden in his poem "Partition" showed the dilemmas of Cyril John Radcliffe, 1st Viscount Radcliffe, responsible for deciding which parts of India went where.
Cracking India is a novel by author Bapsi Sidhwa.
Elsa Kazi (1884–1967), commonly known as "Mother Elsa", particularly in the Sindh province of Pakistan, was a German writer of one-act plays, short stories, novels and history, and a poet. She was a composer and a musician of considerable achievement, involved in virtually every conspicuous branch of fine arts. Her paintings are often seen in many distinguished family homes.
Train to Pakistan is a 1998 Indian Hindi film adapted from Khushwant Singh's 1956 classic novel by the same name set in the Partition of India of 1947 and directed by Pamela Rooks. The film stars Nirmal Pandey, Rajit Kapur, Mohan Agashe, Smriti Mishra, Mangal Dhillon and Divya Dutta.
Dastaan is a Pakistani television series based on the 1971 novel Bano by Razia Butt. Dramatized by author and screenwriter Samira Fazal, it originally aired on Hum TV in 2010. It is set amidst the partition of India and the establishment of Pakistan, taking place between 1947 and 1956. It depicts the story of Bano, a Muslim girl from a close-knit family living in Ludhiana, Punjab Province; the plot revolves around the trials and tribulations that she faces after she decides to dedicate her life to the All-India Muslim League.
The Jinnah family was a political family of Pakistan. It has played an important role in the Pakistan Movement for creation of Pakistan, a separate country for Muslims of India. The family held the leadership of All-India Muslim League, and its successor, Muslim League, until it was dissolved in 1958 by martial law.
The Amils are a Sindhi sub-group of Bhaiband Lohana. The word "Amil" has its origin in the Persian word "amal". Amils used to work in Administration in Government services.
Sindhi Hindus are ethnic Sindhis who follow Hinduism and are native to the region of Sindh. They are spread across modern-day Sindh, Pakistan, and India. After the partition of India in 1947, many Sindhi Hindus were among those who fled from Pakistan to the dominion of India, in what was a wholesale exchange of Hindu and Muslim populations in some areas. Some later emigrated from the Indian subcontinent and settled in other parts of the world.
Viceroy's House is a 2017 fictional drama film directed by Gurinder Chadha and written by Paul Mayeda Berges, Moira Buffini, and Chadha. The film stars Hugh Bonneville, Gillian Anderson, Manish Dayal, Huma Qureshi, and Michael Gambon. It was selected to be screened out of competition at the 67th Berlin International Film Festival.
Kazi Mujtaba was a Pakistani politician. He hailed from Meerut, United Provinces of Agra and Oudh.
The Unsafe Asylum: Stories of Partition and Madness is a 2018 collection of short stories by Anirudh Kala. The book includes a number of interlinking stories which explore the effects of partition on the mental health of people from both India and Pakistan.
Popati Hiranandani was an Indian writer who authored more than sixty books in Sindhi language during her life. She was an essayist, fiction writer, poet, educationist, feminist and social activist. She made significant contributions to Sindhi literature before and after the partition of India. She won several awards including the Sahitya Akademi Award (1982), Woman of the Year Award (1988), and the Gaurav Puraskar (1990) among others.
Vasdev Mohi is a Sindhi poet, translator, critic, short story writer and a retired lecturer. He also served as the member of the executive board of Sahitya Akademi and member of Council for Promotion of Indian Languages, collectively from 2008 to 2013. His work include twenty-five books of poetry, uncertain translation and critic works. The recipient of numerous awards, including Saraswati Samman for his short story book titled Chequebook published in 2012, some of his uncertain critical essays have appeared in literary festivals held in national and international seminars.
Veera Hiranandani is an American writer of children's books. Her 2018 novel, The Night Diary, received a Newbery Honor in 2019. Her novel How to Find What You're Not Looking For won the 2022 Jane Addams Children's Book Award.