Review by New York Times Review
SOME HISTORICAL EVENTS have such utterly catastrophic consequences that no amount of "what if" counterfactuals can yield a more awful result. World War I, for example, resulted in an enormous number of fatalities, largely entrenched the imperialism that initiated it and paved the way for both Nazism and Stalinism. How could a different path have been worse? The 1947 partition of British India, which led to the creation of India and Pakistan as independent countries, was undertaken with nobler motives. But "Midnight's Descendants," John Keay's solid new history of the subcontinent over the past 67 years, leaves the reader with the same depressing thought: No alternative could possibly have been more calamitous. Partition laid the groundwork for the very civil war it was supposed to prevent - as many as one million people may have died - and created a lasting enmity between two states that are now nuclear-armed. If you include the 1971 genocide Pakistan perpetrated against its restive eastern wing (which became independent Bangladesh in December of that year) and the wildly unstable nature of Pakistan today, you are confronted with a disaster of astonishing proportions. Keay's attempt to calculate and analyze this butcher's bill begins at the end of World War II, which not only left Britain unable to maintain the jewel in its rusting imperial crown, but also helped install a Labour government intent on some form of Indian independence. Keay, the author of several strong histories of Asia, ably switches back and forth between the British diplomats sent to negotiate an end to colonial rule and the three crucial (and obstinate) Indian leaders: Mohandas Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru and Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the head of the Muslim League. Keay lays blame on all parties for the "absurdity" of the eventual partition, which sought to group the region's two main religious groups into distinct countries - an act Keay describes, nicely, as trying to "carve the gravy." The Muslim-majority states of Punjab, to the west, and Bengal, to the east, were haphazardly bisected and lopped off Hindu-majority India, creating a new country - Pakistan - whose two wings were separated by more than 600 miles. Lost in the mayhem was what Keay terms "communal harmony," or cross-cultural exchange; smaller religious groups, like the Sikhs, saw their pleas for autonomy brushed aside and their communities arbitrarily separated. The killing itself, moreover, was not just the random mob violence that often occurs when large groups of people relocate; it was specific and direct ethnic cleansing. Keay quotes the historian Yasmin Khan: "Large groups of men, with their own codes of honor and often with a sense of warlike righteousness, set out day after day in August and September to eliminate the other." The rest of Keay's narrative brings the story of the subcontinent into the present, but the effects of partition hang over the entire book. India has seen increasing urbanization, the initial breaking down of gender barriers, wild levels of inequality and a stubbornly high poverty rate. It must also reckon with frequent skirmishes on its Pakistani western border, and refugee crises on its Bangladeshi eastern one. India's democratic institutions remain, under the circumstances, surprisingly vigorous. But corruption is at truly epidemic levels, and areas of Kashmir - the only Muslim-majority state that stayed part of India - are now administered by the Indian military with a decided lack of subtlety or respect for human rights. (India's significant Muslim minority still frequently faces discrimination and diminished opportunity.) The story of Pakistan since partition is even bleaker. "Islam," Keay writes, "instead of cementing Pakistan's integration, would prove highly divisive." Today the Taliban are alternately appeased and wooed; a sectarian political party (made up largely of those who moved from what is now India, and their descendants) controls Karachi, the largest city; Sunni-on-Shia violence is rising; and the reigning international posture - whether it concerns India or Pakistan's colonial attitude toward Afghanistan - is a combination of self-pity and the "warlike righteousness" that Khan cites. (We can partially thank the Pakistani security services for Taliban rule in Afghanistan before 9/11.) ONE OF KEAY'S rare missteps comes in reference to the Shariah law that Taliban fanatics introduced in the Pakistani district of Swat several years ago. "Almost no one recalled that Shariah had a long pedigree in Swat, and might not be entirely distasteful to the Swatis," he writes. "Though rough and gender-biased, it ... ensured the security of property and persons." To describe Taliban rule as "gender-biased" is euphemistic at best - and presumably the people publicly executed by the Taliban are not the ones whose security was "ensured." Moreover, I wonder how Keay knows their rule wasn't "distasteful." I'm not aware of P.T.A. meetings at shuttered girls schools, with everyone voicing feelings and opinions. Still, Keay is certainly right that partition left lasting scars on both India and Pakistan. (Bangladesh continues to limp along with political dysfunction, although most Bangladeshis are doubtless pleased to be rid of Pakistani rule.) Keay does his best to remain sanguine about the subcontinent, noting the calls for institutional reform in India and celebrating the fact that Pakistan "resolutely fails to fail." Let's hope he's right. Jihadists have killed tens of thousands of Pakistani civilians, and they care predictably little for partition lines, as evidenced by their 2008 attack on landmarks in Mumbai. World War I was not, as it turned out, the war that ended all wars. And the partition of 1947 only ensured an age of instability and violence it was meant to prevent. ISAAC CHOTINER is a senior editor at The New Republic.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [May 11, 2014]
Review by Booklist Review
In 1947, exhausted by two world wars, Britain decided to relinquish its imperial control in South Asia, including the subcontinent of India. The successor states that emerged from partition and independence include India, Pakistan, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh. This is a huge geographic area, and its combined population will soon account for 25 percent of humanity. Keay, a historian specializing in Asia, has written an ambitious, wide-ranging study of these states since partition, which he clearly regards as a disaster for both South Asia and the world. According to him, it has resulted in two nuclear-armed states, India and Pakistan, chronically locked in a deadly embrace, while both Islamic and Hindu fundamentalists fan the fires of discord. In the wake of British withdrawal, other ethnic and linguistic tensions have emerged, particularly in Sri Lanka but also within the border regions of India. Still, all is not bleak, as an educated elite within each of these nations is leading the drive toward modernization. This is a well-done examination of a vibrant, dangerous, but promising region.--Freeman, Jay Copyright 2014 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
South Asia specialist Keay (India: A History) tackles a subject too often swept under the rug in the interest of fashioning coherent national narratives. The partition of India and Pakistan, haphazardly implemented in a matter of weeks with no contingency planning and little thought of the future, deeply scarred the region in ways that few political actors, even today, are willing to admit. The amount of human suffering the event caused was almost unprecedented outside of wartime. "War," Keay writes, "even civil war, might have been more manageable than the internecine strife that engulfed large parts of both India and Pakistan." In engaging if occasionally cloying prose, he sketches the conflicting paths traveled by these two nations since their tumultuous birth. One recurring theme is the insufficiency of territorial sovereignty to provide order in so complicated a region; in the borderlands, it is often difficult for a visitor to discern whether a particular village belongs to Pakistan, India, or Bangladesh, and cross-border ties are often stronger and more meaningful than those connecting disparate areas of the same country. Lines on a map came to shape the destiny of entire populations, as "[a]reas, not individuals, became the currency of Partition, districts rather than households the unit of exchange." (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Five independent nations emerged from the 1947 partition of British India, but they have yet to escape its dismal influence, writes prolific British journalist Keay (India: A History, 2008, etc.) in this vivid, thoughtful and not terribly optimistic history. India is secular, democratic and regarded as an economic success--the only one of the five to be considered so. Pakistan and Bangladesh are determinedly Islamic, susceptible to military rule and stubbornly impoverished, and Nepal and Sri Lanka remain traumatized by recent civil wars. Historians still wonder at how everyone got it so wrong. Planning for Indian independence, British negotiators proposed a single realm with elaborate democratic safeguards. Muslim leaders, as British-educated, elite and nonreligious as their Hindu counterparts, viewed an autonomous Pakistan as a political ploy rather than a practicality. Only in the final months did increasing disorder, political missteps and British haste to leave make partition inevitable. Despite several pre-independence atrocities, everyone was flabbergasted at the mass slaughter that followed. Almost immediately, India's occupation of Hindu-ruled but Muslim-majority Kashmir enraged Pakistan, a rage that still obsesses that nation, leading to several wars, innumerable skirmishes, standoffs, terrorist attacks and weak Pakistani governments that defer to the army. To the south, Sri Lanka, independent since 1948, remained peaceful for a few decades but is only now emerging from more than 30 years of murderous ethnic warfare. Keay's only ray of hope shines on the region's largest nation. India's clunky, corrupt democracy enjoys an expanding economy and middle class despite ongoing massive poverty, bloody ethnic, language and religious quarrels, and guerrilla insurgencies. "Over the last half century the shadows of Partition's brutal dislocation have grown ever longer," writes the author. "They slant across the whole course of events in post-independence South Asia." An insightful, entirely engrossing account of a dysfunctional region that may or may not pull itself together.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
