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In India’s past, agrarian crisis and extreme indebtedness led to riots and demonstrations against zamindar landlords who controlled rural wealth.

Partition, as books in recent years by Yasmin Khan and Vazira Zamindar have shown, was a different process depending on which part of it you were caught up in.

The theory eventually circulated that Boori Ma had once worked as hired help for a prosperous zamindar back east, and was therefore capable of exaggerating her past at such elaborate lengths and heights.

Vazira Zamindar’s excellent recent study, “The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia,” opens with an account of Ghulam Ali, a Muslim from Lucknow, a city in central North India, who specialized in making artificial limbs.

An Oxford avatar of the old zamindar mentality—a landlord forcing his attentions on women who depended on him for their livelihood.