Through a somewhat random book club I recently joined I was forced to read Midnight Furies by Nisid Hajari. Political histories are not really my forte (I dragged my feet on the choice) but once I opened this book I realized it wasn't going to be a slow ride.
The book is Hajari's account of the horrific bloodshed that overcame India during partition--when Great Britain withdrew from the subcontinent in 1947, dividing the territory into India and Pakistan. He doesn't spend a lot of time explaining what he's trying to do, or giving interpretation. He doesn't need to. The scale and brutality of the massacres that followed Britain's sloppy transition is truly astounding. His goal is clarity. Instead of giving his own opinions, Hajari spends most of the pages cataloguing what has been obfuscated by time, revisionist history, and general ignorance.
At times his focus is on specific events, disputing casualty figures, diligently breaking down the reaction/counter-reaction of violence that roiled communities of Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs. At other times he focuses on battles within the Dehli Congress. Ethereal Mahatma Gandhi, attempting to play peacemaker until the end, is a minor figure and portrayed as ineffective. Gandhi's protege and India's first Prime Minister, the worldly but naive Jawaharlal Nehru, and Pakistan's founder, irascible Muhammad Ali Jinnah, are the real voices Hajari considers. They are depicted with precision and care through a wealth of primary sources--letters, speeches, reports, treaties, interviews, witnesses. It's as their relationship, and understanding it, is the key to everything. But Hajari doesn't believe anything is that simple. India's slow decent into madness as they quibble is painful to read. This is not for the squeamish--nightmares were common throughout the book club. But nightmares are sometimes worth being explained.
