As a member of a Partition-affected family, I have always had a strong attraction to stories about that time in India when cries for division were suddenly added to calls for Independence from British rule. This means I have spent years reading about the freedom movement and Partition and by now I have reached saturation point.
Yet the second my editor suggested that I review Broken Threads: My Family from Empire to Independence by Mishal Husain, a British journalist of Pakistani descent, I pounced with a terse “Gimme”. Why? Because whatever else the book might tell me, it would give me something I hadn't come across before: the perspective of people who left India for Pakistan, a country that had existed only in imagination before August 14, 1947.
Though I began the book seeking the subject of Pakistan, to my delight I found much aside from it. Husain’s idea in writing Broken Threads was to trace her family history and she was lucky. Not only did she have relatives of her grandparents’ generation still around to talk with, but three of her four grandparents had left behind memoirs of their lives and times. Plus, she had easy access to several archives relating to colonial India that helped her fill in gaps along the way. As a result of this, Broken Threads thrums with life, detailing a family story within the larger history of the subcontinent and presenting enthralling slices of the lives of Indians between the 1920s and the 1940s.
But the most fascinating parts of the book are in the sections titled ‘Before Midnight’ and ‘After Midnight’. Between her grandparents’ memoirs and her own research, Husain brings us the 1940s and its relentless horrors almost graphically, covering World War II as played out in Burma where her maternal grandfather Shahid was posted, the Bengal famine, the politics behind Independence both in Britain and in India, the small-mindedness and pettiness on all sides that made the atrocities of Partition much worse than they should have been, and the creation of two new nations simultaneously choking on blood and inhaling the fresh air of freedom.
Up to the moment the two sets of Husain’s grandparents decided to choose Pakistan, they saw themselves as Indian. So why leave? There are no explicit answers in Broken Threads. But the author’s description of the rising communalism in the subcontinent at the time is enough of an explanation. As a member of a family that has its roots in what has been another country for nearly 80 years now, I think I understand.
Broken Threads: My Family from Empire to Independence
Mishal Husain
HarperCollins India
pp. 276; Rs 499
