‘The Villages We Could Not Return To’ tells the untold story of Partition ripples in Poonch
The novel’s unusual emotional perspective comes from the distance between its narrator and the child he once was
Book Title: The Villages We Could Not Return To
Author: Prof Subhash Chander
Much of the literature on Partition is understandably centred on Punjab and Bengal, where the scale of violence and displacement has been extensively documented. Yet the upheavals of 1947 were not confined to those regions. In the erstwhile princely state of Jammu and Kashmir, the violence and the tribal raids uprooted thousands of families. Their stories have received far less literary and scholarly attention. It is in this neglected space that Subhash Chander’s ‘The Villages We Could Not Return To’ makes its most important contribution.
Set in Nathagala village in Poonch, the novel tells the story of civilians caught in the violence that engulfed the region in October 1947, just months after Partition, when tribal forces attacked villages. Their displacement was not simply a consequence of Partition, but part of the upheaval that followed the violent assault on a princely state whose political future had not yet been decided.
Its narrator is a 14-year-old boy, his world defined by the rhythms of the seasons: green hills in spring, fruit-filled orchards in summer, drying maize and walnuts in autumn. Family, neighbours, temples, gurdwaras, the Pahari language, all create a world in which home seems permanent. And then violence reaches the hills between October 22 and 26.
Muslim well-wishers warn Hindus and Sikhs to leave. Believing they will return within days, the boy’s family locks the door of their ancestral home and leaves for Rawalakot and eventually Poonch. Only, they never return.
Chander’s achievement is to make this history intimate rather than political. Hunger, illness, fear and uncertainty are experienced through a child’s eyes. Refugees crowd temples and gurdwaras, families search for missing relatives and people carry memories of homes they have lost. Yet the novel does not turn its characters into stereotypes. Its remembrance of Muslim neighbours who risked their own lives to help others is particularly important, reminding us that even amid communal violence, individual acts of compassion survived. This refusal to reduce 1947 to communal binaries is among the book’s greatest strengths.
The book is equally valuable as a record of cultural landscape. Chander writes about Poonch not simply as a geographical location but as a world of customs, agricultural rhythms, family traditions, landscapes and language. His discussion of the linguistic character of Mirpur and Muzaffarabad, including references to Pahari and Gojri and the statistics associated with them, is especially intriguing.
Without turning the subject into a political argument, these details illuminate the wider cultural and linguistic affinities of the Poonch-Mirpur-Muzaffarabad region and invite readers to look beyond familiar descriptions of J&K through the narrower lens of Kashmir valley.
The novel’s unusual emotional perspective comes from the distance between its narrator and the child he once was. Now 93 and a retired professor, he allows his 14-year-old self to speak with the innocence, confusion, fear and hope that home can still be recovered. The most haunting moment comes when his dying father asks him to take his ashes back to the land they were forced to leave. The request transforms one family’s loss into a larger meditation on exile and belonging.
Chander writes without bitterness and with considerable compassion. His book reminds us that history is not just preserved in official records; it also survives in languages, landscapes, family stories and the longing for a door closed forever.
— The reviewer is based in J&K
