LONDON -- On either side of the River Thames, two nations often in conflict were recently unified by a single topic, with simultaneous panels sharing stories of the event that gave birth to both: the partition of British India into India and Pakistan in 1947.
Seven decades after that brutal event marked the end of colonial rule, a new struggle between India and Pakistan came home to the heart of the former British empire. On a single May weekend in London, overseas versions of India's Jaipur Literary Festival and Pakistan's Karachi Literary Festival were staged simultaneously -- each presenting its own clutch of novelists, scholars, poets and pundits.
