All things are subject to interpretation but what complicates the proceedings, as Nietzsche said, is the fact that the prevailing interpretation of the time is a function of power and not truth. Having been brought up on versions of history where most ills seem to lie with others, we might find Nisid Hajari’s Midnight’s Furies: The Deadly Legacy of India’s Partition dispelling many myths surrounding us.
Meticulously researched and well-written, Hajari’s narrative not only presents a very graphic picture of the Hindu, Muslim, and Sikh violence surrounding the last few years of the British Raj and the subsequent partition of India, but also the legacy that it left behind for India and Pakistan. Although not overlooked or underplayed in our perceptions, the reality of the sectarian killings that preceded the partition of India into two nations is a subject that if often an addendum when it comes to scholarly analysis.
Choosing to focus on this religious violence and exploring the reasons that contributed to the massacres of Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs between the end of the Second World War and the first India-Pakistan war of 1948, Hajari bases his book on empirical evidence that would be hard to dispute especially when one considers the book’s notes, which run into almost a hundred pages. But irrespective of the numerous sources that Hajari uses, there is an inescapable sense of presentism – that “uncritical adherence to present-day attitudes, especially the tendency to interpret past events in terms of modern values and concepts” – which seeps progressively into Midnight’s Furies.
At the heart of this engrossing chronological tale is the personality clash between Mohammed Ali Jinnah and Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, which to a great extent is considered by Hajari to be root cause for the violence that amplified around the Partition. The mix of information culled from available sources and Hajari’s own narrative suggests that it was Mahatma Gandhi’s leadership of the nationalist movement that contributed to the Muslim alienation and consequently the desire for an independent homeland.
Before the arrival of Gandhi, Jinnah was seen as the perfect doyen of India’s Hindu-Muslim unity. Had it not been for Gandhi, who introduced religion into the freedom struggle, and his subsequent decision to choose Nehru over others, Jinnah would have been the ideal leader.
This is also where the tricky part begins as Hajari infuses Jinnah’s victimhood and Nehru’s larger-than-life statesmanship into both the religious fury of the Partition and the seven-decade-long legacy it has bequeathed. There may be a great deal of truth in this assumption, depending on which side of the divide one is viewing things from. My question, though, is this: could Hajari’s journalistic background, which includes a stint as the foreign editor of Newsweek during the time a cover story suggested that Pakistan was the ‘most dangerous nation in the world’, have unwittingly stamped Midnight’s Furies with hindsight bias, whereby he ends up imposing a present-day perspective on the past?
In a piece that Hajari wrote earlier this year, he squarely blamed India for the mess that Pakistan is. His argument: most Indians are right in thinking that Pakistani generals have little interest in peace as hyping the threat from across the border has not only won the army disproportionate resources and influence in Pakistan, but also fuelled its most dangerous and destabilising policies including covert support of the Taliban and anti-India militants such as Lashkar-e-Taiba (LET). But the trouble, he says, still lies with India.
In spite of the present government seeing no “point in engaging until presented with a less intractable interlocutor across the border”, Hajari insists India bears great responsibility in creating Pakistan’s fears – however exaggerated they may be – because India’s founding fathers set Pakistan up to fail.
Why use the present to explain the past?
Midway into the book, the sense of presentism becomes conspicuous. For instance, the section of the book where Hajari writes about the 1948 war that started off as a tribal-led jihad to capture Kashmir before escalating into a full-scale war between the two new nations reflects the unnatural influence of his knowledge of future Indo-Pak conflicts.
Even though the Maharaja of Kashmir had in principle agreed to side with the dominion of India, Jinnah believed that India had flown in troops into Kashmir even before news of the Maharajah’s decision reached Delhi. Hajari states that the legal implications of this sequence of events might be disputable, however – as Maharajah Hari Singh had asked for Indian help, India didn’t technically need to wait.
But the manner in which he equates Indian and Pakistani participation in the region – ‘the more troops India sent, and the longer they stayed, the greater the chance they too would be accused of committing atrocities’ – assumes a certain sense of moral relativism.
The narrative of Midnight’s Furies is fast-paced and largely source-driven, often describing what’s in the archives without applying critical insights. The extensive use of first-hand documents and records adorns the book with an unflinching realism that is much needed, for how else could the present generations even begin to comprehend the extent of the violence surrounding this period?
But as one of historian David Hackett Fischer’s seven rules of thumb for historians in his book Historians’ Fallacies: Toward a Logical Historical Thought suggests, “the meaning of any empirical statement depends on the context from which it is taken”. In this sense, Hajari somewhere lets such statements be more precise than the evidence may warrant.
For instance, Hajari contends that Nehru’s decision to send Indian troops into ‘Pakistan’s half of the Punjab to “obliterate” the insurgents’ “bases and nerve centres”’ was “a dangerous game to play, then as today, as Indian leaders threaten to respond to Pakistan-linked terrorist attacks with “limited strikes” across the border.” But historians, according to professor Jerry Bannister, work within the realms of probability, not certainty. They try to be as careful as possible, but good history requires occasional guesswork and, therefore, a historian’s best strategy is to be honest with themselves as well as the readers. Hajari’s doggedness in assigning the blame for the mess that Pakistan finds itself in to India’s founding fathers’ desire to set it up for failure (from his earlier piece) reflects upon his narrative of the events of the past.
There is no doubt that Nehru and Sardar Patel, both individually as well as jointly, tried to thwart Pakistan by exposing its inherent flaws based on demographic realities that always undermined Jinnah’s case. In both Punjab and Bengal, non-Muslims nearly equalled Muslims in number, and Jinnah couldn’t force them into accepting his vision of Pakistan if they did not wish to join.
Such a truncated Pakistan that the Quaid dismissed as “a shadow and a husk, a maimed, mutilated and moth-eaten” state was the kind of unattractive prospect that Nehru wanted it to be. But blaming India for fanning the Pakistan Army’s pesent-day fears, a legacy inherited from its violent creation, despite the evidence to the contrary from 1947-48 that Hajari himself presents, weakens his case.
A strange blame game
Some realities, such as reports of the Lashkar’s brutality – which includes raping nuns in a Catholic mission in Baramulla and going on a rampage where the attackers seemed not to distinguish between Christians, Hindus, and even Muslims – are clearly appalling. That officials in Pakistan sent in more responsible tribal figures, or that Pakistan made multiple secret attempts to procure arms from European countries in December 1947, don’t seem to matter while ascribing blame to India retrospectively.
It’s not like the Pakistani Army’s destabilising policies are anything new. In fact, Hajari mentions that despite the huge burden of caring for and resettling several millions Muslim refugees from India, 70 percent of the country’s first budget was earmarked for the military, which included a balance for irregulars such as a home guard as well as fighters in Kashmir.
The barbaric violence that is forever attached to the creation of the modern republics of India and Pakistan is a legacy that can’t be undone. Neither side can overcome the horror or the pain of the loss suffered. But future generations can find it in them to look ahead no matter how difficult letting go of the past might be.
Hajari ends his book with a plea that “it is well past time that the heirs to Nehru and Jinnah finally put 1947’s furies to rest”, but the manner in which he reaches this point is perhaps an elucidation of why this issue might never be laid to rest. His selective interpretation of the past suffers in certain places from the real danger any historian faces – not that they might delude the reader, but that they might delude themselves.
The people and the times Hajari offers an insight into were different, but they were still people, and in this context Professor Bannister’s view ideally sums up the case – for all the emphasis on complexity in history, the past is knowable. Still, irrespective of the book’s adherence to certain present-day attitudes while interpreting some parts of the past, Midnight’s Furies has a lot to offer and is a must-read.
Midnight’s Furies: The Deadly Legacy of India’s Partition, Nisid Hajari, Random House.
We welcome your comments at
letters@scroll.in.
Meticulously researched and well-written, Hajari’s narrative not only presents a very graphic picture of the Hindu, Muslim, and Sikh violence surrounding the last few years of the British Raj and the subsequent partition of India, but also the legacy that it left behind for India and Pakistan. Although not overlooked or underplayed in our perceptions, the reality of the sectarian killings that preceded the partition of India into two nations is a subject that if often an addendum when it comes to scholarly analysis.
Choosing to focus on this religious violence and exploring the reasons that contributed to the massacres of Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs between the end of the Second World War and the first India-Pakistan war of 1948, Hajari bases his book on empirical evidence that would be hard to dispute especially when one considers the book’s notes, which run into almost a hundred pages. But irrespective of the numerous sources that Hajari uses, there is an inescapable sense of presentism – that “uncritical adherence to present-day attitudes, especially the tendency to interpret past events in terms of modern values and concepts” – which seeps progressively into Midnight’s Furies.
At the heart of this engrossing chronological tale is the personality clash between Mohammed Ali Jinnah and Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, which to a great extent is considered by Hajari to be root cause for the violence that amplified around the Partition. The mix of information culled from available sources and Hajari’s own narrative suggests that it was Mahatma Gandhi’s leadership of the nationalist movement that contributed to the Muslim alienation and consequently the desire for an independent homeland.
Before the arrival of Gandhi, Jinnah was seen as the perfect doyen of India’s Hindu-Muslim unity. Had it not been for Gandhi, who introduced religion into the freedom struggle, and his subsequent decision to choose Nehru over others, Jinnah would have been the ideal leader.
This is also where the tricky part begins as Hajari infuses Jinnah’s victimhood and Nehru’s larger-than-life statesmanship into both the religious fury of the Partition and the seven-decade-long legacy it has bequeathed. There may be a great deal of truth in this assumption, depending on which side of the divide one is viewing things from. My question, though, is this: could Hajari’s journalistic background, which includes a stint as the foreign editor of Newsweek during the time a cover story suggested that Pakistan was the ‘most dangerous nation in the world’, have unwittingly stamped Midnight’s Furies with hindsight bias, whereby he ends up imposing a present-day perspective on the past?
In a piece that Hajari wrote earlier this year, he squarely blamed India for the mess that Pakistan is. His argument: most Indians are right in thinking that Pakistani generals have little interest in peace as hyping the threat from across the border has not only won the army disproportionate resources and influence in Pakistan, but also fuelled its most dangerous and destabilising policies including covert support of the Taliban and anti-India militants such as Lashkar-e-Taiba (LET). But the trouble, he says, still lies with India.
In spite of the present government seeing no “point in engaging until presented with a less intractable interlocutor across the border”, Hajari insists India bears great responsibility in creating Pakistan’s fears – however exaggerated they may be – because India’s founding fathers set Pakistan up to fail.
Why use the present to explain the past?
Midway into the book, the sense of presentism becomes conspicuous. For instance, the section of the book where Hajari writes about the 1948 war that started off as a tribal-led jihad to capture Kashmir before escalating into a full-scale war between the two new nations reflects the unnatural influence of his knowledge of future Indo-Pak conflicts.
Even though the Maharaja of Kashmir had in principle agreed to side with the dominion of India, Jinnah believed that India had flown in troops into Kashmir even before news of the Maharajah’s decision reached Delhi. Hajari states that the legal implications of this sequence of events might be disputable, however – as Maharajah Hari Singh had asked for Indian help, India didn’t technically need to wait.
But the manner in which he equates Indian and Pakistani participation in the region – ‘the more troops India sent, and the longer they stayed, the greater the chance they too would be accused of committing atrocities’ – assumes a certain sense of moral relativism.
The narrative of Midnight’s Furies is fast-paced and largely source-driven, often describing what’s in the archives without applying critical insights. The extensive use of first-hand documents and records adorns the book with an unflinching realism that is much needed, for how else could the present generations even begin to comprehend the extent of the violence surrounding this period?
But as one of historian David Hackett Fischer’s seven rules of thumb for historians in his book Historians’ Fallacies: Toward a Logical Historical Thought suggests, “the meaning of any empirical statement depends on the context from which it is taken”. In this sense, Hajari somewhere lets such statements be more precise than the evidence may warrant.
For instance, Hajari contends that Nehru’s decision to send Indian troops into ‘Pakistan’s half of the Punjab to “obliterate” the insurgents’ “bases and nerve centres”’ was “a dangerous game to play, then as today, as Indian leaders threaten to respond to Pakistan-linked terrorist attacks with “limited strikes” across the border.” But historians, according to professor Jerry Bannister, work within the realms of probability, not certainty. They try to be as careful as possible, but good history requires occasional guesswork and, therefore, a historian’s best strategy is to be honest with themselves as well as the readers. Hajari’s doggedness in assigning the blame for the mess that Pakistan finds itself in to India’s founding fathers’ desire to set it up for failure (from his earlier piece) reflects upon his narrative of the events of the past.
There is no doubt that Nehru and Sardar Patel, both individually as well as jointly, tried to thwart Pakistan by exposing its inherent flaws based on demographic realities that always undermined Jinnah’s case. In both Punjab and Bengal, non-Muslims nearly equalled Muslims in number, and Jinnah couldn’t force them into accepting his vision of Pakistan if they did not wish to join.
Such a truncated Pakistan that the Quaid dismissed as “a shadow and a husk, a maimed, mutilated and moth-eaten” state was the kind of unattractive prospect that Nehru wanted it to be. But blaming India for fanning the Pakistan Army’s pesent-day fears, a legacy inherited from its violent creation, despite the evidence to the contrary from 1947-48 that Hajari himself presents, weakens his case.
A strange blame game
Some realities, such as reports of the Lashkar’s brutality – which includes raping nuns in a Catholic mission in Baramulla and going on a rampage where the attackers seemed not to distinguish between Christians, Hindus, and even Muslims – are clearly appalling. That officials in Pakistan sent in more responsible tribal figures, or that Pakistan made multiple secret attempts to procure arms from European countries in December 1947, don’t seem to matter while ascribing blame to India retrospectively.
It’s not like the Pakistani Army’s destabilising policies are anything new. In fact, Hajari mentions that despite the huge burden of caring for and resettling several millions Muslim refugees from India, 70 percent of the country’s first budget was earmarked for the military, which included a balance for irregulars such as a home guard as well as fighters in Kashmir.
The barbaric violence that is forever attached to the creation of the modern republics of India and Pakistan is a legacy that can’t be undone. Neither side can overcome the horror or the pain of the loss suffered. But future generations can find it in them to look ahead no matter how difficult letting go of the past might be.
Hajari ends his book with a plea that “it is well past time that the heirs to Nehru and Jinnah finally put 1947’s furies to rest”, but the manner in which he reaches this point is perhaps an elucidation of why this issue might never be laid to rest. His selective interpretation of the past suffers in certain places from the real danger any historian faces – not that they might delude the reader, but that they might delude themselves.
The people and the times Hajari offers an insight into were different, but they were still people, and in this context Professor Bannister’s view ideally sums up the case – for all the emphasis on complexity in history, the past is knowable. Still, irrespective of the book’s adherence to certain present-day attitudes while interpreting some parts of the past, Midnight’s Furies has a lot to offer and is a must-read.
Midnight’s Furies: The Deadly Legacy of India’s Partition, Nisid Hajari, Random House.