On 3 June 1947, as British India descended into chaos, its division into two states was announced. For months the violence and civil unrest escalated. With millions of others, Marina Wheeler's mother Dip Singh and her Sikh family were forced to flee their home in the Punjab, never to return. Through her mother's memories, accounts from her Indian family and her own research in both India and Pakistan, she explores how the peoples of these new nations struggled to recover and rebuild their lives.As an Anglo-Indian with roots in what is now Pakistan, Marina attempts to untangle some of these threads to make sense of her own mother's experience, while weaving her family's story into the broader, still highly contested, history of the region.This is a story of loss and new beginnings, personal and political freedom. It follows Dip when she marries Marina's English father and leaves India for good, to Berlin, then a divided city, and to Washington DC where the fight for civil rights embraced the ideals of Mahatma Gandhi.The Lost Homesteadtouches on global themes that strongly resonate today: political change, religious extremism, migration, minorities, nationhood, identity and belonging. But above all it is about coming to terms with the past, and about the stories we choose to tell about ourselves.
About the Author
Marina Claire Wheeler QC (born 18 August 1964) is a British lawyer, author, columnist, and the ex-wife of British prime minister Boris Johnson. As a barrister, she specialises in public law, including human rights, and is a member of the Bar Disciplinary Tribunal. She was appointed Queen's Counsel in 2016.Marina Claire Wheeler was born to BBC correspondent Sir Charles Wheeler and his second wife, Dip Singh, an Indian Punjabi Sikh; her ancestry goes back to the city of Sargodha in West Punjab, present-day Pakistan, with her maternal family migrating to present-day India after the Partition of India.She was educated at the European School of Brussels, and then in the early 1980s at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, where she wrote for the student magazine Cantab.At the European School, she became friendly with Boris Johnson, later a journalist and politician. Her sister, Shirin Wheeler, is an EU spokeswoman.
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