Winner of the prestigious Wolfson History Prize, this book soars above run-of-the-mill histories with the author’s unconventional approach. She uses her family heritage – Bengali father and British mother – interweaving accounts of her childhood with lucid analysis to make deep political points, including about nationalism’s double-edged nature. A review with excerpts from her radio interview with the writer.
By Amitabh Pal / Sapan News
Cambridge historian Joya Chatterji’s dexterous modern history of Southasia combines the personal and the political, charting the histories of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh in the not-too-distant past.
The book, Shadows at Noon: The South Asian Twentieth Century, recently won the reputable Wolfson Prize — with 50,000 pounds in prize money – awarded for combining “excellence in research with readability.” It excels on both counts.
Its creativeness starts with the title itself. (Full disclosure: Prof. Chatterji is the sister of my schoolmate.) Last September, she spoke to me and my co-host Gil Halsted for our show World View, a global affairs programme on the community radio station in Madison, Wisconsin.
The title, she told us, is “about the contradiction of the high noon of our subcontinent in which freedom and partition occur at the same moment and, in a sense, it is the violence of nationalism coming to its fruition. It’s the dappled quality of history at the time.”
She writes in her introduction that she was born in Delhi in 1964. “We lived on what was then the frontier of the city. As a child, I heard jackals howl at night; each morning I was woken by the peacock’s cry.”
This book, she goes on to say, tells the story of Southasia’s 20th century, encompassing the peacock, the writer, and the rest of the population. “That history has been turbulent, rich and compelling. It tells us much about how the present came to be.”
Double-edged
A major focus of the book is nationalism’s double-edged nature. It outlines the onset of nationalisms in late 19th century India and goes on to delineate the various varieties — religious and linguistic — that have marked Southasia. Above all, there are the official nationalisms of the three prominent countries that have dominated the region. In her ‘World View’ radio interview – and in her book – Chatterji calls nationalism a combination of honey and arsenic.
“I regard nationalism as a potentially dangerous thing and as a very seductive thing,” she said in her interview with us. “I imagine it as a bit of arsenic in a lovely honey-tasting sweetdish. Everybody gets seduced, but at its heart it also has violence.”
For Chatterji, the book’s focus has implications far beyond Southasia.
“So many of the themes are writ large all over the world,” she states in a video made for the Wolfson Prize website. “And so I think this is a book not only about Southasia. It is really about what nationalism is like when you make the nation God.”
The book is a kaleidoscope of topics. There is extensive description of migrations — internal and external — and the refugees created due to the two partitions – 1947 and 1971. There is rich social and ethnographic commentary on family and gender. There is a large section on leisure in Southasia, and there is a particularly delicious portion on food practices and policy.
And then there’s a Note on Further Viewing dealing with a special fascination of Chatterji: Indian cinema. In her radio interview, she offers a delightfully idiosyncratic take on the all-time Bollywood blockbuster Sholay. To Chatterji, the movie becomes all about a woman and the two men who set out to rescue her.
In the book and in her radio interview, her recommendations for viewing include a range of movies from old classics such as Nargis’ Mother India and Guru Dutt’s Kaagaz Ke Phool (Paper Flowers) to Amitabh Bachchan’s Deewar (Wall) and Shah Rukh Khan’s Devdas. She has a special affection for master filmmaker Satyajit Ray’s oeuvre.
What makes the book soar above run-of-the-mill histories is the unconventional approach that Chatterji takes. She deftly utilizes her family heritage – Bengali father and British mother – interweaving accounts of her childhood with lucid analysis to make deep political points.
Summer visits to her father’s family home in the narrow “chicken neck” region in India’s Northeast convinced her of the futility of boundaries, she said in her radio interview.
“My father used to put me on his shoulders and say, ‘There’s Bangladesh, there’s Nepal, there’s Bhutan,’” she remarked. “It was a land of frontiers. It is the reason that for much of my career I’ve been fascinated by frontiers. I was like, ‘Where’s Bangladesh? I don’t see anything different. I see the same thing on both sides.’”
Bowled out by Gandhi
There are riveting anecdotes sprinkled throughout the book. For instance, her husband, Anil, played cricket as a child with Gandhi on the last full day of the Mahatma’s life — with Bapu bowling Anil out on the first ball. And a radical friend of Chatterji’s father, Amar Raha, who was jailed for his revolutionary ways, used to spend summers with her family.
Chatterji has a somewhat bleak assessment of the region’s future.
“There is a tendency toward authoritarianism that makes this an incredibly dangerous time in the three countries,” she concluded in her radio interview. “The issues are the same, the problems are the same on the ground in the three countries.”
The book is driven by a personal passion.
“South Asia is so surprising, so fascinating, so intricate and so disturbing that I, for one, remain spellbound, still powered by the drive to understand it all,” she writes in the epilogue. “This book, I hope, conveys some sense of my compulsion to understand. If I have passed a little of it on to you, the endeavor will have been worth it.”
The book also won the 2023 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in History and has been shortlisted and longlisted for various other recognitions. It deserves all the accolades it is receiving.
Amitabh Pal has spent decades in the journalism and education fields. He currently is the communications director for a nonprofit focused on secular issues, teaches political science courses at Edgewood College in Madison, Wisconsin, and co-hosts a global affairs show on Madison’s community radio station WORT (89.9 FM).
LEAD IMAGE : Shadows at Noon book cover; R: Portrait of Joya Chatterji (c) Tara McManus. Courtesy: Wolfson History Prize website
This is a Sapan News syndicated feature available for republication with due credit http://www.sapannews.com.
Note on Southasia as one word: We use ‘Southasia’ as one word, “seeking to restore some of the historical unity of our common living space, without wishing any violence on the existing nation states” – Himal Southasian.
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