MIDNIGHT’S FURIES - NISID HAJARI

AVAILABLE This book taught me that the word, “goonda” which is a sub-continent specific word, apparently from the Hindi for “rascal,” meaning something like hired thug or goon. Interestingly, “thug” itself comes from India. It’s an interesting and useful term (there seems to be a lot of “goonda spotting” w/r/t these recent uprisings) but perhaps the most upbeat thing I learned from this book. Otherwise, the book is sort of in the model of KING LEOPOLD’S GHOST, WE WISH TO INFORM YOU THAT TOMORROW WE WILL BE KILLED WITH OUR FAMILIES, or EMPIRE OF THE SUMMER MOON, which are basically long lists of atrocities and the background that serves to make them all atrocious. While I have reservations about this genre as a whole, and specific quibbles with some of the books I listed, MIDNIGHT’S FURIES does manage to keep from being a harrowing slog. It mostly achieves this through brevity and concision. The amount of background you could do about the India/Pakistan partition is endless. 100+ lifetimes of scholarship. Why are East Bengal and West Punjab Islamic while the middle section of the country is largely non-islamic? What’s going on with Hyderabad? What’s the historical relation between Sikhs and Muslims? How did the British conquer such a large piece of territory? How did they rule it and how did the people living on the subcontinent resist this rule until they finally gained independence? Again, I think you could write a dozen 500 page books for each one of these topics and MIDNIGHT’S FURIES really helps itself by sidestepping them and just getting into the period around partition. We don’t even get a deep background about what someone as central as Ghandi’s life and activism was like before ~1945. This trade-off does allow Hajair to go deep on the events of those few years. I definitely knew that Muslims fled India to Pakistan and vice-versa for Hindu Pakistanis but I did not know the scale of the slaughter that caused this. I didn’t realize that multiple cities experienced multiple, multi-day rampages that left literally thousands dead. Choking-the-rivers-with-corpses, blackening-the-sky-with-carrion-birds, Brugel level shit. I lived in India for a little over a year, spending time in both Kolkata as well as Hyderabad and, despite these pogroms being within living memory, life did continue. I did meet Muslims and Hindus and Christians and Sikhs in all of these places and the was amazed at the time about how little animosity I was sensing. Which was not at all zero, I grew up in the South and I would still hear people making anti-islamic or anti-hindu or anti-whatever statements and expressing such sentiments, but it seemed on the level of racial tensions in the USA. And despite how horrendous the history of the US, it’s mind bending to consider how much longer and deeper and complicated the social relations in India are. I’ve always found it helpful to think about India this way: You know how ignorant people will occasionally refer to the country of “Africa,” lumping all of Africa’s diversity into one monolith? Something akin to that did happen on the subcontinent. While India is a tenth the size of Africa, imagine Britain had knitted together all of it’s African holdings at the end of colonialism and declared it one big new country. This obviously simplifies the issue a lot and doesn’t take into account the fact that the Indian National Congress wanted a huge, united India, it does sort of highlight how this country covers these regions that have different religions and cultures and languages and histories and climates and interests and lifeways. It’s amazing India can keep it together (tho, their current president did oversee a riot/massacre of Muslim very much like the ones described in this book when he was a governor) and honestly flabbergasting when viewed from the United States, a nation that deals with similar issues. Anyway, the book was very helpful in polishing my conception of India and Pakistan. The author seems pretty pro-India, tho after finishing, it’s hard to really imagine ways to make Jinnah look great. The whole thing really seems to end in tragedy, given the current situation. I didn’t “know-know” but I guess I always knew the guy who literally drew the border flew in to India, a place he’d never been before, drew the line without visiting the region, and left to never return again. And the literal date for independence was chosen on a whim by the Viceroy. There’s certainly a version of this book that focuses more on the British end of this but I’m glad I read this one first. Whenever the plague ends, I should return to India. 1947 religious sites.