Our Bureau
Mumbai
Bloomsbury India has announced the publication of Farewell Karachi, a poignant tapestry of love, loss, and resilience that captures the heart wrenching experiences of a family torn apart by the horrors of Partition. The book has been authored by celebrity journalist and writer, Bhawana Somaaya.
Farewell Karachi is the story of a family planting its roots in a new country at the cusp of a violent partition. Spanning over a hundred years and five generations, the narrative draws on an intimate portrait of a large family that grew up under the unspoken spectre of partition. Told in an astonishingly mosaic and archaeological tone, this is the saga of a displaced Gujarati family from Karachi that moved to Kutch and subsequently to erstwhile Bombay in India to rebuild a life for themselves.
In telling this moving tale, the book also seeks to make sense of and heal from the foundational wound of two South Asian infant nation-states, exploring how that wound shaped the imminent future of the peoples partitioned along the Radcliffe Line. In here are dreams, some shattered, some salvaged; in here are customs, heartbreaks and carefully preserved recipes. At the heart of this memoir are the stories behind the nests we weave.
When Somaaya’s therapist once asked her what her biggest fear in life was, she unthinkingly said, ‘It’s not having a roof over my head.’ Until then, she had never acknowledged the intergenerational trauma-informed instinct of displacement and placelessness. She was yet to unpack its haunting grip on her flights, fights and freezes.
Bhawana Somaaya has been a film critic for more than 40 years and has written for a galaxy of Indian publications. She is the former editor of Screen and has authored several books on cinema, including biographies of Hema Malini and Amitabh Bachchan. Several of her books are taught to students of cinema in India. She has served on the advisory panel of the Indian Central Board of Film Certification and the governing council of Film and Television Institute of India.
Somaaya is a classical dancer, a broadcaster, a podcaster, and an author of 19 books with Farewell Karachi being her 20th product. She was conferred with Padma Shri in 2017; an honorary doctorate by Jagran Lakecity University in 2021; and the Kanak Nartan Puraskaar from Nalanda Nrityakala Mahavidyalay in 2022. She is the entertainment editor at 92.7 BigFM radio station.
