Our school textbooks in India, for instance, teach us that both India and Pakistan are distinct from each other. While India was a secular country, Pakistan was a Muslim nation. One scholar further alludes to India as a thriving democracy and Pakistan as autocratic in nature.
However, the revisionist history writing in recent years has turned these claims on their head. The argument is that there is much more in common with all of South Asia than the differences. Now, again, with the Hindu Nationalist regime of Narendra Modi at the helm, it becomes difficult to sustain a celebratory narration of the success of Indian democracy.
In this refreshingly new take on the history of the Indian subcontinent, Historian Joya Chatterji has documented the history of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh in the long ‘South Asian twentieth century’. The book Shadows at Noon remarkably documents historical developments in nationalist movements, state formation, citizenship projects, and socio-political narratives about marriage, food, cinema, and all other things that bind South Asians together.
In scope, the book matches the historical depth of Ramachandra Guha’s India After Gandhi, which triumphantly celebrates Indian nationalism and its democratic experiment. Unlike Guha, Chatterji places the blame for partition on the Congress: early on, with Hindu nationalists within the Congress, like Tilak, for their over-zealous assertion of cultural symbols of Hindu civilisation within nation-making, and later with Nehru’s inability to accommodate Muslim interests in the 1930s.
Chatterji writes: ‘What changed, particularly in the 1930s and 40s, was not Jinnah but the Congress whose leadership became even more insistent that it represented the entire nation, and after its electoral successes in 1937, grew less interested in the politics of compromise. From the 1930s, onwards, the Congress claimed to be the sole spokesman for “India”, and progressively its leadership saw less reason to conciliate those who rejected that claim’ (p. 67).
As Chatterji notes: ‘This book makes a fresh and profound argument. Despite partition, India and Pakistan did not fly off to distant corners of the universe’ (p. xix). In fact, paradoxically even, the two nations ‘came to resemble each other’ more and more throughout their postcolonial histories (p. 82). In this sense, Chatterji’s argument is novel, for it shows us that despite everything—all hatred and otherwise, there are ‘common patterns’ and ‘continuities’ in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh.
In the first part, documenting the political narrative of South Asia over a century, Shadows at Noon explores nationalism, statehood, and citizenship.
Shadows at Noon highlights that the nationalist movement in British India was distinct in two aspects: methods and identity. There were constant debates—even quibbles—over what was the best way to pursue nationalist goals. The early Congress leadership adopted a policy of appeasement towards the British, while the latter took to revolutionary tactics—and some even resorting to making bombs.
In one hilarious anecdote, in 1906, the revolutionary Hemachandra Kanungo of Anushilan Samity made a bomb, placed it inside a book and posted it to Kingsford, a former magistrate of Calcutta. But it turns out that Kingsford was no lover of Shakespeare or even Voltaire. He was not reading man and, therefore, placed the book unopened on his shelf. (And the bomb awaits its time!)
The nationalist ideas also differed in terms of what made for an Indian nation. There were some who claimed its Hindu character, others who situated Muslims as minorities first and a distinct nation later, and there were also those who wanted the secular character of the state to be retained.
History has a political goal. School textbooks are often used to both craft what the nation was and to teach the citizens how they are now bound to a common historical narrative. Therefore, just as I have alluded to earlier, it is not surprising that India and Pakistan (and later Bangladesh) have put concerted efforts into crafting propaganda-like historical narrations about what their nations stood for.
Such historical narrations ‘droned on, ponderously, sonorously, and repetitively’ in citizenship projects about how the nation came to be formed and what the nation-state did for people’s benefit. Chatterji writes: ‘It was not so much that this publicity was executed with brilliance. It was not. It was merely the case that it was repeated ad nauseam, and that everydayness made the message natural’ (p. 145).
Just as someone thinks of British rule in India, there is a tendency to think of this omnipresent being whose tentacles of power pervaded all of South Asia. Joya Chatterji tells us that it is not true. In fact, the colonial state did not cover all of South Asia. There were several gaps mated by the geographical conditions that made it difficult for the British to penetrate, specifically in wet, hilly forest lands in Northeastern India and dry, rocky uplands in Northwest Frontier and towards Afghanistan. For a brilliant discussion on this, see Berenice Guyot-Rechard’s Shadow States: India, China, and the Himalayas, 1910-1962.
British colonial rule was mired by violence. The late-colonial state developed several coercive tactics—from public flogging to collective fines to villages en masse to forced flag marches and firing at unarmed crowds (as seen in the Jallianwala Bagh massacre of 1919). ‘Whipping some poor felon demonstrated power, if not hegemony’ (p. 252).
Importantly, the colonial rule itself relied heavily on Indian intermediaries. At the provincial level, the British police officers made for just one per cent of police; the rest were all Indians, even those from poor families. British depended on chaukidars (or watchmen) to be the ‘state’s eyes and ears in all the subcontinent’s villages’ (p. 226). There were also quaanungo, patwaari or karnam; all of these worked with the British officials to collect taxes, adjudicate disputes, and interpret laws and customs. But this did not ease the British fears. In fact, the British ‘feared their laws are being subverted by local intermediaries’ (p. 256).
In essence, the nation-states in South Asia—India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh—came to resemble each other more and more. Each priced loyalty for the nation above everything else. Each sustained the bureaucracy intact, along with all the pomp, power and perks that came with it. Each denounced narrow provincialisms for a strong central state. Citizenships even began to mirror one another: In India, Muslims held minority citizenship, while in Pakistan and Bangladesh, Hindus and Sikhs held the same.
In the second part, Shadows at Noon documents the cultural characteristics that shape South Asia. In her discussion of migration, Chatterji poignantly argues that all of South Asia is shaped by migration and is the ‘most important driver of social, political, and cultural change in twentieth-century South Asia’ (p. 297). Besides the two partitions, in 1947 and 1971, there were also internal migrations that went unnoticed. Think of any city today in the subcontinent, and there are no natives of South Asia. Everyone has moved internally—and the only difference is how far back someone has settled into a place.
There are instances when Joya Chatterji presents a self-reflexive account of growing up in an aristocratic Brahmin family, the subtle patriarchal rules that structure it, the caste hierarchies, the food habits, everything. At times, the reader is left wondering about—and being envious of—the affluence that followed the Chatterji household. For example, in the 1950s, the Chatterji household had employed a lower-caste Brahmin cook (for a Brahmin only ate that which was cooked by another Brahmin), Kanchha, a Nepalese boy, as a driver, and Malati and her sons, Jugnu and Ratan, who cleaned and swept floors.
The book also documents elaborate Brahmanical rituals and the food habits—and their caste categories: kaccha and pakka foods, and satvik, rajsik, and tamsik foods, and why some Brahmin households don’t eat onions and garlic. (Yes, you guessed it right, they consider them impure!) Inquisitively, Chatterji takes a distinct route. Rather than moving from caste relations to food habits, the Shadows at Noon premises food at the centre and draws on caste relations that shape those habits. However, the discussion of Muslim familial relations, marriage ceremonies, patriarchal norms and socio-economic patterns finds little mention despite the two nations the writer covers being Muslim nations.
Much like the Chatterji household, which sustained an elaborate set of workers—who cooked, cleaned, and drove them around, there is a discussion of subalterns in Shadows at Noon. For they may never read this work, the book itself presents the Subaltern’s lives in their very social settings—as snake charmers, wrestlers, indentured labourers, housewives, and sex workers, among others.
There is also cinema, art, and entertainment in the last few pages of the book. To my surprise, I knew so little about what Chatterji talked about. As a South Indian with barely any exposure to Hindu cinema or Bollywood, reading through 35-odd pages about Bollywood and Bombay cinema and its subtle subtext that cinema unites all of South Asia was frustrating.
South Indian cinema is gone for a toss, as is the case with many South Indian experiences throughout the book. Several cinema personalities in the South, including MGR, Annadurai, Karunanidhi, and Jayalalita, have profoundly shaped South India’s politics. But there is no mention of it. But, importantly, as much as all of South Asia is united by cinema, it is also as much distanced, disillusioned, and dismayed by it.
The book also does too many self-narrations and has sometimes come off as off-putting. For instance, at once, the author tells us about the Sapru household and how the Saprus were very respectful of the poor istriwaali, who ‘burned a valuable tissue-silk sari just before yet another Kashmiri wedding’ (p. 63). In another instance, the author elaborates on how Mahatma stayed in a mansion belonging to the Birlas only to note further that her husband, Anil, played cricket with the Mahatma, who ‘bowled him out with his first ball’ (p. 103). (This important historical anecdote was left out of documentation in South Asian histories–and this scholarly gap is now fixed!)