When India was given her independence in 1948 it should have been a time of celebration. After decades of protest and a failed revolution in the 19th century, she was finally stepping out from under the heel of her colonial master Great Britain to be a unified country for the first time in centuries. Instead it was a time of horrible turmoil and sectarian violence, as if in their last act of contempt for their former subjects the British arbitrarily split the country into Muslim and Hindu halves.

While in theory Muslims and Hindus could have stayed on in what were to become Pakistan and India, in practice people fled in both directions in fear of their lives. Families left homes that they had lived in for generations with nothing more than what they could carry on their backs. The British troops who were supposed to oversee the transit of people from one part of the country to another somehow or other never materialized and thousands of people died in riots.

Is it any wonder that India's first prime minister, Nehru, dreamed of a secular state where what mattered was your nationality, not your religion? Unfortunately, bigotry is stronger than dreams, and it's easier to hold on to hatred than to learn tolerance. People are always going to need someone to blame their troubles on (heaven forbid they take responsibility for their own actions) and there's nothing like the convenience of a readily available scape-goat. So in spite of Nehru's desires, and Gandhi's death at the hands of a fanatical Hindu that must have given an inkling of the obstacles to be overcome, India in the years immediately following partition was a powder keg of resentments just looking for a fuse and match.

Manil Suri's recently released novel, The Age Of Shiva, begins in 1955, just prior to the festivities marking the seventh anniversary of India's independence. Meera Sawhney is seventeen when the story opens and according to her father, a firm believer in Nerhu's secular state, her generation is the one that will shake off the shackles of religion and the blinkers of tradition and lead India into the modern world. Yet if her father is the future of India her mother is the past. Deeply religious and illiterate, she was married to Meera's father at the age of ten, and moved in with him four years after their marriage.