Point of View

The author of Train to Pakistan is Khushwant Singh, a widely known Indian novelist and journalist and humorist, along with being a poetry lover. Singh was born to a Sikh family and was a secularist as an adult, educated in England. In August 1947, Sign was driving to his family's summer home in the partition area when he met a jeep or armed Sikhs who were bragging that they had killed an entire village of Muslims, which inspired Train to Pakistan.

One can see clear and obvious influences from Singh's life in the book, including his horror at the arbitrary killing during the summer of 1947 and his experience both as a Sikh but also as an English educated secularist. In many ways, Singh is most like Iqbal, though Iqbal is clearly not the favored character in the story.

The book is written in the third person, and...