I confess to being a complete ignoramus on the history of the partition of India. Luckily, the brilliant Broken Threads by Mishal Husain has come along to change that. Husain – fiercely intelligent BBC Radio 4 news presenter, feared by British politicians for her razor-sharp interviews – has written the memoirs of her grandparents and parents. In Broken Threads, she weaves together the political and the personal to create an insightful and moving account of their lives as well as India and Pakistan’s fraught shared history.
A gold brocade fabric that once was a dress worn at her parents’ wedding inspires Husain to piece together the lives of her grandparents. Familiar to her only through snippets of information, their lives spanned one of the most dramatic and uprooting periods in India’s history. From a country where Muslims, Christians, Hindus and Sikhs lived peacefully alongside each other, India was hastily and dramatically split into India, West and East Pakistan (subsequently Bangladesh) in 1947. Husain’s grandparents, themselves a mix of faiths and geographies, were caught in the middle, forced to uproot and move to Pakistan because of their, mainly, Muslim faith.
They make for an interesting bunch: Mumtaz a Muslim Army physician who, controversially, falls in love and secretly marries Mary, a Catholic from a poor fatherless family. Years would pass before he breaks the news to his deeply religious parents who have already lined up his cousin as his wife-to-be; Shahid a Sandhurst graduate who moves through the ranks to become Private Secretary to Claude Auchinleck, the British Commander-in-Chief of the Indian Army and his wife Thahira, a nurse, whose tape recording form one of the main sources for the book.
We get to know Muhammad Ali Jinnah, leader of the Muslim League and father of Pakistan, whose fame has been overshadowed, at least in my part of the world, by Nerhu and Gandhi. We see how Viceroy Mountbatten’s close personal relationship with Nerhu would challenge his role as neutral executor of the partition. And most harrowing of all, how the partition tore families apart, turned previously peaceful neighbours into foes, killed thousands on both sides and positioned the two countries as bitter enemies. Husain can’t help reflect on what could have been had the country followed Gandhi’s wish for a united India.
Letters, diaries, memoirs, tape recordings, interviews with her grand aunt and some impressive primary source digging makes this book a fascinating, impressive and compulsive read, both on the personal and historical levels.
Only God knows when Mishal Husain had time to do it all.
Broken Threads by Mishal Husain is published by 4th Estate, 278 pages.
