Safar: A Child's Walk To Freedom During the Partition of India - Paperback

by Amrik Singh Chattha (Author)

As a ten-year-old Sikh boy, the author and his family experienced the violence and trauma of migration to India after the British drew a line demarcating India and Pakistan. Here, Chattha discusses the historical and political factors leading up to Partition, examining leadership and cultural forces. He shares his family's migration story as well as those of three other Sikh children in the only published first-person account of the migration written from a Sikh child's perspective. In addition, he relates his visit to his home village in Pakistan years after his family was forced to journey east to settle in India. Finally, Chattha, a practicing neurologist for forty-one years, explores the neurobiology of violence and its link to religion.

Author Biography

Amrik Singh Chattha, MD, was born in 1937, in the village of Chattha Chak No. 46, now located in Pakistan. His educational journey took him, in India, through Sikh National College, Qadian; Government Medical College, Patiala (where he met his wife, also a medical student); and Government Medical College, Amritsar; and in the United States, from Drake Memorial Hospital, Cincinnati, Ohio; New York Medical College, New York City; Boston Children's Hospital; and Mass General Hospital, Boston. He spent five years in Boston training in neurology. He and his family then moved to Weirton, West Virginia, where he practiced neurology for forty-one years, finally retiring to the San Francisco Bay Area. Since his marriage to Dr. Jaswinder Kaur Brar, in 1961, they have journeyed together.