Midnight's furies The deadly legacy of India's partition

Review by Choice Review

Hajari led international coverage for Newsweek for more than ten years and for Time for four years and is a commentator for media outlets. He is on the Council on Foreign Relations, is Asia editor for the website Bloomberg View, and resides in Singapore. A keen observer of events, Hajari has a journalist's eye for details and employs a journalist's colorful turn of phrase. A graduate of Princeton and Columbia, he has lived in various cities, including New Delhi. Hajari's extensively researched and lively volume covers the period from 1946 until the ceasefire in Kashmir on January 1, 1949, when "Nehru's long battle with Jinnah had ended." In emphasizing the violence that accompanied independence in 1947, the central motif of the volume is the conflict and contrast between Muhammad Ali Jinnah and Jawaharlal Nehru. Chapter 2 dissects the lives of the two figures. A seven-page epilogue, "Deadly Legacy," focuses on Pakistan's turn to militancy and sponsorship of terrorist groups and the danger this has created in South Asia and for the world. Suitable for general readers, the volume offers useful pointers to US sources for scholars. Summing Up: Recommended. All levels/libraries. --Roger D. Long, Eastern Michigan University

Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.

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Review by New York Times Review

BEYOND WORDS: What Animals Think and Feel, by Carl Safina. (Picador, $18.) Humans have been far too anthropocentric when trying to understand the mental experiences of other animals, Safina, a marine conservationist, argues here. His observations on grieving elephants in Kenya, endangered wolves in Yellowstone National Park and a harmonious whale society in the Pacific Northwest build the case that other species are capable of nuanced thought and emotion. KITCHENS OF THE GREAT MIDWEST, by J. Ryan Stradal. (Penguin, $16.) This bighearted novel is partly a culinary biography of Minnesota, tracing how traditions (lutefisk) give way to fads, and partly a sendup of food. The story's central character, Eva, is born into a food-obsessed family and soon displays preternatural gifts of her own, using cooking to overcome a childhood tragedy. THE SEVEN GOOD YEARS: A Memoir, by Etgar Keret. Translated by Sondra Silverston, Miriam Shlesinger, Jessica Cohen and Anthony Berris. (Riverhead, $16.) The author, an Israeli, has built a fan base devoted to his fantastical short stories. In this, his first nonfiction book, Keret focuses on the stretch of time between his son's birth and his father's death, and considers the absurdities of fatherhood and family life. DAYS OF AWE, by Lauren Fox. (Vintage, $16.) The death of Isabel's close friend in a car crash sets off a period of tragedies; a year later, Isabel and her husband have divorced, her adolescent daughter has grown aloof and a number of her other relationships have become unmoored. Isabel reconsiders her identity throughout this novel as the relationships that once defined her fall away, but her rapport with her mother remains at her emotional core. THE WEATHER EXPERIMENT: The Pioneers Who Sought to See the Future, by Peter Moore. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $16.) If forecasts and precise weather reports are now a ubiquitous part of life, in the 1800s, the premise was improbable - even laughable. Moore, a Briton, tells the story of the 19th-century scientists and sailors who set out to show that data could help predict future meteorological patterns, and he includes the American contributions to the field. THE GAP OF TIME, by Jeanette Winterson. (Hogarth Shakespeare, $15.) In this novel, the inaugural title in a series of books "covering" plays by Shakespeare, Winterson ad apts the story of "The Winter's Tale" to a con temporary, post-financial-crash setting. Leo, a paranoid hedge fund manager in London, sends his newborn daughter to New Bohemia, a facsimile of New Orleans, after a fit of jealous rage. MIDNIGHT'S FURIES: The Deadly Legacy of India's Partition, by Nisid Hajari. (Mariner/ Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $15.95.) Hajari's account focuses on the months preceding the 1947 split between India and Pakistan, probing one of the conflict's central questions: How did two countries with so many commonalities end up as bitter rivals?

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [August 11, 2016]

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Review by Booklist Review

Hajari, who writes editorials on Asia for Bloomberg View, teases out the history behind the Partition, out of which Pakistan was created with the departure of the British from India in 1947. While there were certainly massive political forces at work among Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, and the British Raj, Hajari shows how much the interpersonal dynamics among those constituencies' leaders especially between the Hindu-dominated Indian National Congress party's Jawaharlal Nehru, tasked with holding the country together, and the All-India Muslim League's Muhammad Ali Jinnah, who voiced the resentments of underrepresented Muslims exaggerated differences between the two groups, leading to the split and resultant bloodletting. The book's subtitle notwithstanding, Hajari does not really cover the region's history from Partition to 2015. Still, a fine unwinding of an epic event.--Moores, Alan Copyright 2015 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Gandhi, Jinnah, Nehru-these towering figures of South Asian independence are widely familiar today for the outsize impact they had on the shape of the modern world. But Hajari, Asia editor for Bloomberg View, turns away from them to deliver the story of the grassroots: faceless actors operating in secret as they overwhelm ideologies and official pronouncements, fomenting chaos to an extent no leader could have predicted. In a region as complex and densely populated as South Asia, events on the ground-often leaderless and seemingly random-can make short work of any policy or plan. Hajari highlights the insufficiency of governments to curb the passions of their populations, devoting a large portion of the book to the contested territory of Kashmir, just one of a multitude of flashpoints at the time of the 1947 partition, albeit the one that arguably inspired the most passion in the dueling leaders. "Given the paucity of unbiased accounts," he notes, "the question [of who had first attacked whom in Kashmir]-while endlessly debated over the last six decades-is impossible to answer." The failure to come to any resolution on that issue has haunted the Indian subcontinent ever since, and Hajari laments that the cycle of recriminations has hardened into a permanent obstacle to peace. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

The August 1947 granting of independence to India (previously a British colony) and the creation of Pakistan was not supposed to be a bloodbath. However, even before independence, violence erupted in Calcutta and tore apart the Punjab region. Within weeks of the partition, fighting took root in Kashmir, which straddles India and Pakistan. Somewhere between 200,000 and one million Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs were ethnically cleansed as brutality spread across the Indian subcontinent. Trying to understand how these events could have created such a wide gulf between India and Pakistan, Hajari (Asia editor, Bloomberg View) skillfully chronicles these occurrences in a fast-paced narrative that is framed by the political ambitions of Pakistan's Mohammed Ali Jinnah and India's Jawaharlal Nehru. If ever a situation demanded truly effective leadership, partition was such an instance. Unfortunately, both Jinnah and Nehru frequently come across as ineffectual. Their personal shortcomings surfaced at precisely the wrong moments and repeatedly triggered tumult on the subcontinent as extremists on all sides seized the account and sparked one spasm of bloodshed after another. -VERDICT This harrowing tale of political miscalculation and misunderstanding is recommended for all readers of history, politics, and current affairs.-Chris Sauder, Round Rock P.L., TX © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

This evenhanded history of the appalling slaughter at the India-Pakistan Partition of 1947 puts the blame squarely on the incendiary rhetoric of the two opposing leaders.Hindus and Muslims (and Sikhs and Christians) living tolerantly together for centuries on the subcontinent faced down their colonial oppressor, Britain, only then to turn against each other at the moment of liberation: How could this have happened? Singapore-based Asia editor for Bloomberg View Hajari sees a chasm in understanding between the two sides replete with "their own myopic and mutually contradictory version of events, which largely focus on blaming the other side or the British for provoking the slaughter." The author begins his dark chronicle in the last year before the British transfer of power, when Viceroy Archibald Wavell passed his "breakdown plan" to the president of the Indian National Congress Party, Jawaharlal Nehru, the Anglophile leader of the dominant Hindus and ally of Gandhi who fiercely believed that a multiethnic India was fundamental to the new nation's identity. Nehru's intractable nemesis, the equally urbane English barrister Mohammad Ali Jinnah, head of the powerful Muslim League, was "prideful, biting, uncompromising," and he scorned Nehru's offer of a token position in the Hindu-dominated government. By 1940, Jinnah had envisioned "Pakistan" (acronym for the combined Muslim-dominated provinces of Punjab, tribal Afghanistan, Kashmir, Sind and Baluchistan) as allied with the British. Yet as the two sides dug in and the rhetoric escalated (Jinnah periodically calling for "Direct Action" while dismissing Gandhi's nonviolent tactics), so did the sectarian bloodshed, rolling westward, from the Great Calcutta Killings of August 1946 to the Punjab, Delhi and Kashmir. Hajari skillfully picks through this perilous history of mayhem and assassination of biblical proportions, which has left a "deadly legacy" of paranoia, terrorism and hatred between India and Pakistan 70 years later. A carefully restrained and delineated account makes for chilling reading. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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Prologue   A Train to Pakistan   Ahead, the Jeep's headlights picked out a lonely stretch of railroad track. The driver slowed, then, when still about a third of a mile away, pulled over and waited. All around wan stalks of wheat, shriveled by drought and rust, trembled in the hint of breeze. Two turbaned figures emerged from the gloom, borne by an ungainly, knock-kneed camel.     At a signal the five broad-shouldered men in the jeep piled out. They carried a strange assortment of objects--a brand-new Eveready car battery, rolls of wire, a pair of metal hooks with cables attached, and three lumpy, unidentifiable packages. Moving quickly, they joined the now-dismounted riders and headed for the copse of trees that lined both sides of the permanent way. When they reached an irrigation canal that ran along the tracks, several of the men slid down its banks and hid.     Two others dashed forward. Each tucked one of the mysterious parcels against a rail, then carefully attached a wire to the soft gelignite inside and trailed the cable back to where the others crouched. A third man brought the pair of hooks over to a nearby telephone pole and used them to tap into the phone line. As he listened, waiting for word of the Karachi-bound train, his compatriots grimly checked their revolvers.     The men were Sikhs, recognizable by their long beards and the turbans enclosing their coils of uncut hair. They had the bearing and burly physique of soldiers--not surprising given that their tiny community had long sent disproportionate numbers of young men to fight in the Indian Army's storied regiments. In the world war that had just ended two years earlier, Sikhs had made up more than 10 percent of the army even though they represented less than 2 percent of the population.     The eavesdropper motioned to his comrades: the train was coming. This was no regularly scheduled Lahore Express or Bombay Mail. Onboard every passenger was Muslim. The men, and some of the women, were clerks and officials who had been laboring in the British-run government of India in New Delhi. With them were their families and their ribbon-tied files; their photo albums, toys, china, and prayer rugs; the gold jewelry that represented much of their savings and the equally prized bottles of illicit whiskey many drank despite the strictures of their religion. On 9 August 1947 they were moving en masse to Karachi, 800 miles away, to take part in a great experiment. In six days the sweltering city on the shores of the Arabian Sea would become the capital of the world's first modern Muslim nation and its fifth largest overall--Pakistan.     The country would be one of the strangest-looking on the postwar map of the world. One half would encompass the fierce northwestern marches of the Indian subcontinent, from the Khyber Pass down to the desert that fringed Karachi; the other half would include the swampy, typhoon-tossed Bengal Delta in the far northeast. In between would lie nearly a thousand miles of independent India, which would, like Pakistan, win its freedom from the British Empire at the stroke of midnight on 15 August.     The Karachi-bound émigrés were in a celebratory mood. As they pulled out of Delhi, cheers of "Pakistan Zindabad!" (Long live Pakistan!) had drowned out the train's whistle. Rather than laboring under a political order dominated by the Hindus who made up three-quarters of the subcontinent's population, they would soon be masters of their own domain. Their new capital, Karachi, had been a sleepy backwater until the war; American GIs stationed there raced wonderingly past colorful camel caravans in their jeeps. Now a boomtown fervor had overtaken the city. The streets were a roaring tangle of cranes and scaffolding, and the dust from scores of building projects mixed with drifts of desert sand. If the city could hardly handle the influx of new residents--"the difficulty of putting several hundred quarts into a pint pot is extreme," Britain's first ambassador to the new Pakistan remarked--a good-humored camaraderie had so far smoothed over most tensions. Ministers perched on packing crates to work as they waited for their furniture to arrive. Their clerks used acacia thorns for lack of paper clips.     To the Sikhs leaning against the cool earth of the canal bank, this Pakistan seemed a curse. The new frontier would pass by less than 50 miles from this spot, running right down the center of the fertile Punjab -- the subcontinent's breadbasket and home to 5 million of India's 6 million Sikhs. Nearly half of them would end up on the Muslim side of the line.     In theory, that should not have mattered. At birth India and Pakistan would have more in common with each other -- politically, culturally, economically, and strategically -- than with any other nation on the planet. Pakistan sat astride the only land invasion routes into India. Their economies were bound in a thousand ways. Pakistan's eastern wing controlled three-quarters of the world's supply of jute, then still in wide use as a fiber; almost all of the jute-processing mills lay on the Indian side of the border. During famine times parts of India had turned hungrily to the surplus grain produced in what was now Pakistan's western wing.     The Indian Army, which was to be divided up between the two countries, had trained and fought as one for a century. Top officers--still largely British--refused to look on one another as potential enemies. Just a few nights earlier both Hindu and Muslim soldiers had linked arms and drunkenly belted out the verses of "Auld Lang Syne" at a farewell party in Delhi, swearing undying brotherhood to one another. Cold War strategists imagined Indian and Pakistani battalions standing shoulder to shoulder to defend the subcontinent against Soviet invasion.     Many of the politicians in Delhi and Karachi, too, had once fought together against the British; they had social and family ties going back decades. They did not intend to militarize the border between them with pillboxes and rolls of barbed wire. They laughed at the suggestion that Punjabi farmers might one day need visas to cross from one end of the province to the other.     Pakistan would be a secular, not an Islamic, state, its founder, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, promised: Hindus and Sikhs would be free to practice their faiths and would be treated equally under the law. India would be better off without two disgruntled corners of the subcontinent, its people were told, less charitably. "Division," as India's first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, put it, "is better than a union of unwilling parts." The fight to establish Pakistan had been bitter but astoundingly short--occupying less than ten of the nearly two hundred years of British suzerainty over India. Surely in another decade the wounds inflicted by the struggle would heal.     The Sikhs tensed as a long, low whistle from the train floated toward them. In the distance, they could see the engine's headlamp rocking gently through the fields. Their eyes followed its progress until the train rounded a last bend and the spotlight blazed up before them like a miniature sun, bright and blinding. They rose, surging with adrenaline. Seconds later the Pakistan Special's heavy black engine thudded over the spot where the gelignite charges lay, then its first bogie.     The Sikh holding the battery gripped the detonator switch he had rigged up to it. When the second passenger car was directly over the improvised mine, he firmly pressed down. Excerpted from Midnight's Furies: The Deadly Legacy of India's Partition by Nisid Hajari All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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