Torn from the Roots

An extraordinary first-hand account of Operation Recovery, an operation carried out by the newly constituted governments of India and Pakistan in 1947 to recover abducted women and children and restore them to their families. Kamlaben Patel, right-hand woman of Mridula Sarabhai who oversaw Operation Recovery, conveys the pathos and urgency of those turbulent times in her candid, no-holds-barred memoir of the more than five years that she spent in Pakistan and on the recovery mission; of how women were exchanged like oranges and apples; of the heartbreaking stories she heard and the lives she saved. Compassionate in its humanitarianism, this book is also of rare archival value, restoring women to a central place in the history of India s Partition.

like Gandhiji s speeches which were short on oratory but came from the heart, Kamla Patel s text...also comes from the heart....it is worth reading....a timely reminder that we have yet to purge ourselves of the communal venom... --Khushwant Singh, Outlook

...given the sheer tide of Partition things in which we are drowning, after the silence of half a century, it isn t easy for something to stand out. And yet, this modest memoir does....(its) unique value derives from the fact the author... has no axe to grind, no point to prove...the short naïve sentences capture brilliantly the particular quality of this memoir. --Alok Rai, The Book Review