Balwant Bhaneja

Born in Lahore in present-day Pakistan, Balwant Bhaneja grew up in the exiled Sindhi Hindu community of Delhi, before emigrating to Canada. Troubled Pilgrimage is his account of a journey to his ancestral Sindh in Pakistan. Struggling against the preconceptions nurtured in post-1947 India, and his own recent fears of the country he’s about to visit, Bhaneja finds in Sindh the familiar and the strange, a homeland whose experience is as warm as it is wrenching, dispelling misunderstandings while raising profound questions about himself. This account is at once a meditation on exile, home, and identity, and on being a modern Canadian, as it is a journey into the enchanting, mystical land that was lost to his people at the Partition.