New Delhi, Aug. 16 -- Sometime in the 1950s, at a lunch with friends in Karachi, where she had moved with her mother from Lucknow after Partition, Urdu writer Qurratulain Hyder (1927-2007) snapped at an interlocutor. "Roots do not necessarily grow perpendicularly downward into the soil," she said in response to his discourse on the importance of forging a national identity. "They are usually entangled within one another."

The remark, which appears in A Tilt in Time, a new translation of selections from her multi-volume biographical work Kar-e-Jahan Daraz Hai (Immense is the Work of the World) by Fatima Rizvi, is emblematic not only of Hyder's feelings towards the division of the subcontinent but also of an entire generation's, uprooted f...