Lost Generations

by Manjit Sachdeva

SynopsisWritten in the genre of black humour with satire, Lost Generations is the most morbid and grotesque story of 20th century history about the Partition of Punjab in 1947, in which up to 2 million people died on both sides of Radcliffe’s partition line, hundreds of thousands of women were raped, abducted and sold into slavery and millions of businesses and properties on both sides were plundered and incinerated during the last days of British raj and after British forces left the sub-continent in what is described by Stanley Wolpert in his aptly titled book Shameful Flight.It is the tragicomic saga of deracination of a well-off Sikh family forced out of Rawalpindi as told through their point of view, and their struggles and partial rehabilitation in Delhi. The story covers a span of almost 200 years from 1790 to 1984 CE.The novel climaxes with the carnage of predominantly refugee Sikhs in Delhi in November 1984 following the assassination of Indira Gandhi by her Sikh bodyguards.It is a story of misogyny, sexism, racism, intolerance, corruption, exploitation, and materialism —all innate to Indian society—described through black humour.

494 pages, Hardcover

First published July 27, 2013

About the author

Manjit Sachdeva was born in Lahore (now in Pakistan) in 1945. At the time of the partition of Punjab in 1947, the family took refuge in India staying in refugee quarters in Allahabad for fifteen years. The author studied mechanical engineering at Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur (1962–67), and industrial engineering at Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur (1976–77). He and his family, settled in Delhi in 1984, witnessed the genocide of refugee Sikhs in November 1984. They immigrated to Australia in 1988 and have been settled there since then. He is married with two well-settled children. Lost Generations is his first novel.