‘Written as a journal in Urdu by Fikr Taunsvi, this is a rare and refreshing first person account of the mayhem and death that enveloped Lahore between August and November 1947 as the British Raj came to its convulsive end in Punjab. Deftly combining social satire with political critique, Taunsvi anticipates Saadat Hasan Manto’s partition fiction, written after 1948, while displaying a more skeptical view of human frailties in general and politicians in particular than the Urdu story writer. Translated into accessible English, The Sixth River is a most welcome addition to the burgeoning personal narratives on Punjab’s and India’s Partition and will be read widely by students and scholars.’

—Ayesha Jalal, Mary Richardson Professor of History, Tufts University

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‘Direct, despairing, satirical, and heartbreaking, Fikr Taunsvi’s first person account of the violent moment of India and Pakistan’s birth, is rendered here in a powerful translation. The author’s seething anger, his deep confusion about belonging, unbelonging, friendship, love, home, nation and boundaries fill the pages of this journal and bring to the often arid terrain of history a sense of how it is lived on the ground, experienced on the body and felt in the heart.’

—Urvashi Butalia, Feminist writer, publisher and author of The Other Side of Silence: Voices from and the Partition of India

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‘In Fikr Taunsvi’s extraordinary The Sixth River, an exquisite translation by Maaz Bin Bilal, Partition has an

aural quality, it sounds through questions, rumours, outcry, and the responses that the very fact of Partition silences. This searing text of a psychological and physical journey that propels one man across a border is the story of a collective defeat, of how hate equally tears asunder the lives of those who are misled by it as well as those who could never distinguish between nation states, political leaders, and Hindus and Muslims.

’—Ayesha Kidwai, Professor of Linguistics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, and translator of Anis Kidwai’s In Freedom’s Shade

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‘Fikr Taunsvi’s Chhata Darya, newly translated as The Sixth River by Maaz Bin Bilal, is one of the key memoirs to appear in the wake of the Partition. This atypical ironic record of Fikr’s experiences and thoughts in the months leading up to his decision to migrate from Lahore to India some time after the Partition, along with Manto’s writings, provides crucial literary testimony to widespread historical trauma in the wake of 1947. Long overdue, this translation of the complete memoir by Maaz Bin Bilal is an important contribution to the evolving discourse on the Partition and its afterlife.’

—Tarun K. Saint, author, Witnessing Partition

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‘Chhata Darya or The Sixth River is a project of historical recovery. From the literary vault, Maaz Bin Bilal translates and brings to us the journals of Fikr Taunsvi, born Ram Lal Bhatia, and known for his satirical writing in Urdu. He belongs to an era which may seem alien in contemporary India and Pakistan, but which epitomised the spirit of the pre-Partition Punjab. Taunsvi wrote his journals in the moments during the passage of Partition, representing and capturing and reflecting some of the raw emotions of that time. His journals are one of the first, direct eye-witness responses, recording and documenting his impressions of the fast-changing landscape around him. The rupture of 1947 radiated far and deep from the terra firma on which it was territorially effected and these critical memoirs— translated here from Urdu—are emblematic of those layers of tragedies, in which not only territory but people and language, region and culture, were also ruptured. At a time when there is a renewed fragmentation, narrowing of critical discourse and attempted homogenising of nation and people, Taunsvi’s work deserves a wider audience and Bilal has done a tremendous job.’

—Pippa Virdee, Senior Lecturer in Modern South Asian History at De Montfort University, Leicester, and author of From the Ashes of 1947: Reimagining Punjab