About a third of the way through her endnotes-heavy book, Joya Chatterji takes a step back from her recap of South Asian history of the 20th century. She is explaining how the state acquired shape in Pakistan at Independence/Partition, how it was a state governed by a migrant bureaucracy, with insufficient infrastructure at the time to house its central government or its military command, and how “the language of the migrants (Urdu) became Pakistan’s national language”; “A new state was born and refugees ran its ‘steel frame’.”
For more than 25 years, says Chatterji, a leading historian of Partition and now emeritus professor of South Asian History at Cambridge University in the U.K., she has taught this, and each time the year’s new class has needed her to pause for a few minutes to absorb these “befuddling facts”.
Bangladeshis celebrate 50 years of victory over Pakistan, at an event in Dhaka, in 2021. On December 16, 1971, Pakistani soldiers surrendered to a joint India-Bangladesh force, formally making Bangladesh a new nation under the leadership of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. | Photo Credit: AP
It’s not just this juncture that compels the reader to pause, however. This history of nation-making in the 20th century — taking in its sweep political developments, the birth of Bangladesh (“an astonishing occasion in modern history in which the majority seceded from a nation”), migrations, food consumption and habits, caste, class, leisure, love, family, marriage, cinema — gives the reader cause to pause every so often, sometimes to flip back the pages, but more often to look at the thoughtfully detailed notes at the end. These references to the archives, to published works, to novels, etc. are supplemented by family stories as well as recommendations of films to watch to sufficiently absorb the points being made.
The world of Apu
A still from Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali.
There is a whole section on “further viewing”, but throughout the main text there are suggestions woven in. For instance, to get a sense of the patriarchy that informs eating habits, Chatterji asks us to watch how the growing Apu is fed by his widowed mother in Satyajit Ray’s Aparajito. (FYI, if you should choose to watch just one South Asian film, she says it had best be Ray’s Pather Panchali.)
Chatterji arranges her chapters thematically, but within a chapter she moves chronologically, and if not, she often reminds the reader of the chronology. Explaining the backdrop, with Savarkar’s Hindutva formulation, to the establishment in 1925 of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, she adds that this was the time when Mahatma Gandhi “began to build the Congress at the grassroots too, with his six-anna membership scheme open (in theory at least) to all”.
Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and Pakistan President Zulfikar Ali Bhutto at the first round of talks in Simla on June 28, 1972. | Photo Credit: The Hindu photo archives
Throughout, she signposts the missed opportunities that may have averted Partition — the Lucknow Pact of 1916, the Sapru report of 1944 — failures, in effect, to build on the politics of compromise. She repeatedly finds a “fascinating symmetry” in the years since Partition. For instance: “...five Bangla-speaking activists died on 21 February 1952 in Dacca in East Pakistan, a few months before Sriramulu”, whose death by fasting hastened the formation of a new Andhra state in India for Telugu-speakers. In the mid-1960s Indira Gandhi in India and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in Pakistan had the same slogan underpinning their politics: roti, kapdaa aur makaan (food, clothing and shelter).
Ties that bind
Commuters watch an exhibition on Partition Horrors Remembrance Day, at Rajiv Chowk metro station, New Delhi. | Photo Credit: PTI
In a spare timeline, these and other examples could be put down as cute coincidences. But fortified with a reading, especially, of migration “at home and abroad” and state-building (the standout sections in Shadows at Noon), they hint at the connections that bind India, Pakistan and Bangladesh — they don’t necessarily reflect common causality, but they deepen Chatterji’s professed argument: “Despite partition, India and Pakistan did not fly off to distant corners of the universe. They stayed right where they were, nestled up against each other in the same ecosystems, connected by the Himalayas, the Karakoram ranges and two enormous river systems, by the monsoons, and by a shared legacy of structures of rule. And a lot else — let’s call it history.”
Jawaharlal Nehru with Mohammed Ali Jinnah in Delhi, in 1939. | Photo Credit: The Hindu photo archives
In taking us on a vivid tour of that “lot else”, her personal views are inevitably privileged. Chatterji’s is, in fact, a South Asian history and a personal history, in a way that renders it a nonfiction companion to Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. The title teases the reader to make the connection. It is threaded with family and personal experiences, and Chatterji’s opinions on historical events and cultural markers provide countless a-ha moments — such as her choice of wrestling as a thread in her survey of leisure. There may also be the occasional unconvinced shake of the head — for instance, her harsh appraisal of Nehru (vis-a-vis Jinnah).
It is, therefore, that in a book as rich in detail and perspective as this, which makes an important case for empathy in South Asia, factual errors are especially unfortunate. As examples — Jessica Lal was not shot in Delhi’s Hauz Khas Village, but in the Qutub area; the Mohenjodaro dancing girl is in a museum in Delhi, not Karachi.
Shadows at Noon: The South Asian Twentieth Century; Joya Chatterji, Penguin Viking, ₹1,299.
The reviewer is a Delhi-based journalist and critic.
