The division of south Asia into separate nation states on the eve of Independence was a partitioning of minds, as much as that of divided geography" write Prof Sanjeev Jain and Dr Alok Sarin in their edited book, The Psychological Impact of the Partition of India (Sage Publishing).

The book is the result of a surprising revelation they came across when they applied for a grant to study the psychiatric and medical history of Partition, under a project on the history of psychiatry they had been working on for almost a decade. "We couldn't find any first-person accounts of the psychiatric distress [caused by Partition] in medical literature.