‘Midnight’s Furies,’ by Nisid Hajari

By Aatish Taseer
July 10, 2015

Few books need more urgently to be written than a definitive oral history of the
1947 partition of India. The partition, even by the standards of a bloody century,
was hideous; it left between one and two million people dead and displaced 15
million others; it caused the dismemberment of a syncretic society and led to the
largest forced migration in the history of humanity. The generation that lived
through that terrible time is on its way out, taking its unrecorded memories.

In “Midnight’s Furies,” a fast-moving and highly readable account of the violence

that accompanied the partition, Nisid Hajari sets himself a more modest task:
How did two nations with so much in common end up such inveterate enemies so
quickly?

Hajari answers this question with a dramatization of the violent year that
preceded partition. The dramatis personae are introduced, as per conventions
established by Richard Attenborough’s “Gandhi.” There is the “famously
handsome” Jawaharlal Nehru with his “high, aristocratic cheekbones and eyes
that were deep pools — irresistible to his many female admirers”; there is the
“mystical, septuagenarian” Mahatma Gandhi; there is the monocled, slightly
sinister Mohammad Ali Jinnah, “cheekbones jutted out of his cadaverous face
like the edges of a diamond”; and, lastly, there is Lord Louis Mountbatten, “tall
and tanned,” the “Hollywood version of a British prince.”

Once the characters are in place, Hajari leads us briskly through months of
growing tension, of communal violence and political wrangling, that culminate in
the painful decision of two communities — three, if you count the Sikhs — to go
their own ways. In its finest moments, “Midnight’s Furies” is the story of what
happens when a composite society comes apart. It is not simply an emotional
matter; it is a wrenching practical affair. The exchange of populations is only the
half of it; there is, in addition, the division of armies, bullion, land, water and holy
places. Hajari expertly captures the murderous insanity of the task at hand, and
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how every detail, as in a divorce, becomes imbued with the bitterness of the
separation. The chapters on Kashmir — “the wound that keeps the paranoia and
hatreds of 1947 fresh for both Pakistanis and Indians” — are superlative.

Hajari is less skillful at capturing the depth of feeling behind the demand for
Pakistan. Muhammad Iqbal, the philosophical founder of the country, and the
first man to seriously make the case for an entity like Pakistan, does not receive
so much as a mention. The omission of Iqbal — tantamount to leaving Sayyid
Qutb out of the story of radical Islam — denies the reader a sense of the
insecurity of Indian-Muslim experience in the early 20th century and, as an
extension, the historical inevitability of Pakistan. Robbed of its context, partition
comes to seem like little more than a tragicomedy of errors, a play of egos. Hajari
is forced into explanations like: Jinnah’s “genius was to link his own frustrations
to those of his community.”

Now, in 1947 it might still have been possible to view the demand for Pakistan as
an isolated thing. Could it really be seen that way today, when all across the
Muslim world societies that were once plural have forced out their non-Muslim
populations, and when, in Pakistan itself, after the initial exodus of Sikhs and
Hindus, the society has turned its fury on Christians, Shiites and Ahmadis?

That the passage of years brings no added insight to Hajari’s view of partition is a
serious failing. Jarring, too, are the number of inaccuracies, visible even to the
inexpert eye. It was not Clement Attlee whom Winston Churchill once “wickedly”
called “a sheep in sheep’s clothing”; it was the Labor leader Ramsay MacDonald.
Satyagraha is not “literally ‘soul force’ ”; it is literally the force — or insistence,
rather — of truth. Muslims did not object to the Congress anthem “Vande
Mataram” because it “included several verses” thought to be anti-Muslim; they
objected to the novel from which the verses were taken, and the portrayal of
India as the goddess Durga. Edwina Mountbatten was not the daughter of King
Edward VII’s financier, Sir Ernest Cassel; she was his granddaughter. The
standard initialism for the Hindu nationalist group the Rashtriya Swayamsevak
Sangh is not, as Hajari has it throughout, R.S.S.S., but simply R.S.S.

The errors give one the sense of being in unsafe hands. This is made worse by
Hajari’s overdependence on secondary sources. Take, for instance, the story of
Nanda Lal, the owner of a popular snack shop, who experiences a day of terror in
Calcutta. It is the monsoon: “The air clung to his skin and sweat-stained kurta
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like a damp rag.” Hajari describes how Lal rolls up the metal blinds of his shop,
the sleeping cows struggling to their feet to avoid the streetcars, which were
normally full, but that morning were eerily empty. This quality of detail made me
think the story had come directly to Hajari. In fact, it is the rewriting of an
episode from Margaret Bourke-White’s book “Halfway to Freedom.” Hajari gives
Bourke-White a footnote, but he does not tell us that what we are reading is the
retelling of a story told to somebody else.

It would be grossly unfair to judge Hajari’s entertaining and gossipy history

against some phantom book it might have been. But there is no getting away
from the strangeness of reading rehashed secondary sources, many English and
American, when there is so much firsthand history unrecorded. It may be that all
good books arouse an expectation they cannot wholly satisfy. “Midnight’s Furies”
is a good book but ultimately a small one. The event exceeds its frame. What we
get is a thumbnail image; what we are left wanting — and what the partition
deserves — is a Delacroix.

MIDNIGHT’S FURIES
The Deadly Legacy of India’s Partition
By Nisid Hajari
Illustrated. 328 pp. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $28.

Aatish Taseer is the author of “The Way Things Were.”

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A version of this article appears in print on , Page 13 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: State of Disintegration
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