Kavita Puri Interviewed by Alastair Niven

Award-winning BBC journalist Kavita Puri explains how she sought out the stories of British citizens caught up by the partition of India in 1947 to reveal the trauma of that time and how the diaspora of post-colonial Pakistan and India helped to shape the UK.

Puri set out to seek the stories of South Asians in the UK after her father opened up at the age of 70 about the horrors he had witnessed as a 12-year-old. Puri uncovered the personal stories behind events that saw more than a million killed in fighting, tens of thousands of women raped and millions fleeing in both directions. It is also a story of how empire led so many to come to the UK and how partition is part of a painful and rarely spoken of shared history.

Puri is an executive producer and presenter in current affairs and has also worked on Newsnight. Her three-part series Partition Voices for BBC Radio 4 won the Royal Historical Society’s Radio and Podcast Award and its overall Public History Prize. Here she talks to Dr Alastair Niven, who was chair of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for 20 years and has taught and written widely on Commonwealth and post-colonial literature.

This event is part of the festival’s programme of Indian literature and culture.