Hello and welcome to The Spectator's Book Club podcast. I'm Sam Leith,

literary editor-ed for The Spectator. My guest this week is radio journalist Kavita Puri,

whose new book, well, it's new in paperback anyway, is partition voices untold British stories.

And Kavita's book is, it arose from a radio, a radio program originally, didn't it?

Can you tell me a bit about the background to it?

Because it starts, you know, it's a piece of journalism, but it starts from something

quite personal, doesn't it?

It does start from something quite personal.

I suppose we have to go back a couple of years.

It was just before the 70th anniversary of Partitions. So 2016 and in my own family, partition is a story,

but it's not one that I knew anything about because nobody talked about it.

It was my dad, I knew the very, very bare facts, which was that he grew up in Lahore and at the age of 12, he had to move to India.

And every time I tried to talk to him about it, he would say, why do you want to talk about that?

And he would talk about everything else. You know, he'd talk about growing up in Lahore. He would say, why do you want to talk about that? And he would talk about everything else.

You know, he'd talk about growing up in Lahore. He'd talk about being a teenager in India.

He'd talk about coming to Britain in 1959. But he would always close me down at that point that I

asked him about partition. And so I wondered, oh, well, maybe that's just me. So I asked friends of

mine, British, South Asian friends, is this something that you experienced? And they said, oh,

yeah, yeah, that's the same. So I thought when the anniversary was approaching, it was 70 years,

it's such a long time. I thought, maybe it's something more than that. And so I persuaded the commissioners

at Radio 4 to do a series talking to British, South Asians and colonial British. So seeing

partition from a British perspective, rather than the Indian subcontinent perspective. But I didn't

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