Midnight's Descendants

January 6, 2014
South Asia specialist Keay (India: A History) tackles a subject too often swept under the rug in the interest of fashioning coherent national narratives. The partition of India and Pakistan, haphazardly implemented in a matter of weeks with no contingency planning and little thought of the future, deeply scarred the region in ways that few political actors, even today, are willing to admit. The amount of human suffering the event caused was almost unprecedented outside of wartime. “War,” Keay writes, “even civil war, might have been more manageable than the internecine strife that engulfed large parts of both India and Pakistan.” In engaging if occasionally cloying prose, he sketches the conflicting paths traveled by these two nations since their tumultuous birth. One recurring theme is the insufficiency of territorial sovereignty to provide order in so complicated a region; in the borderlands, it is often difficult for a visitor to discern whether a particular village belongs to Pakistan, India, or Bangladesh, and cross-border ties are often stronger and more meaningful than those connecting disparate areas of the same country. Lines on a map came to shape the destiny of entire populations, as “reas, not individuals, became the currency of Partition, districts rather than households the unit of exchange.”

January 1, 2014
Five independent nations emerged from the 1947 partition of British India, but they have yet to escape its dismal influence, writes prolific British journalist Keay (India: A History, 2008, etc.) in this vivid, thoughtful and not terribly optimistic history. India is secular, democratic and regarded as an economic success--the only one of the five to be considered so. Pakistan and Bangladesh are determinedly Islamic, susceptible to military rule and stubbornly impoverished, and Nepal and Sri Lanka remain traumatized by recent civil wars. Historians still wonder at how everyone got it so wrong. Planning for Indian independence, British negotiators proposed a single realm with elaborate democratic safeguards. Muslim leaders, as British-educated, elite and nonreligious as their Hindu counterparts, viewed an autonomous Pakistan as a political ploy rather than a practicality. Only in the final months did increasing disorder, political missteps and British haste to leave make partition inevitable. Despite several pre-independence atrocities, everyone was flabbergasted at the mass slaughter that followed. Almost immediately, India's occupation of Hindu-ruled but Muslim-majority Kashmir enraged Pakistan, a rage that still obsesses that nation, leading to several wars, innumerable skirmishes, standoffs, terrorist attacks and weak Pakistani governments that defer to the army. To the south, Sri Lanka, independent since 1948, remained peaceful for a few decades but is only now emerging from more than 30 years of murderous ethnic warfare. Keay's only ray of hope shines on the region's largest nation. India's clunky, corrupt democracy enjoys an expanding economy and middle class despite ongoing massive poverty, bloody ethnic, language and religious quarrels, and guerrilla insurgencies. "Over the last half century the shadows of Partition's brutal dislocation have grown ever longer," writes the author. "They slant across the whole course of events in post-independence South Asia." An insightful, entirely engrossing account of a dysfunctional region that may or may not pull itself together.

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February 1, 2014
In 1947, exhausted by two world wars, Britain decided to relinquish its imperial control in South Asia, including the subcontinent of India. The successor states that emerged from partition and independence include India, Pakistan, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh. This is a huge geographic area, and its combined population will soon account for 25 percent of humanity. Keay, a historian specializing in Asia, has written an ambitious, wide-ranging study of these states since partition, which he clearly regards as a disaster for both South Asia and the world. According to him, it has resulted in two nuclear-armed states, India and Pakistan, chronically locked in a deadly embrace, while both Islamic and Hindu fundamentalists fan the fires of discord. In the wake of British withdrawal, other ethnic and linguistic tensions have emerged, particularly in Sri Lanka but also within the border regions of India. Still, all is not bleak, as an educated elite within each of these nations is leading the drive toward modernization. This is a well-done examination of a vibrant, dangerous, but promising region.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)