Book: BROKEN THREADS: MY FAMILY FROM EMPIRE TO INDEPENDENCE
Author: Mishal Husain
Published by: 4th Eastate
Price: Rs 499
Borrowing heavily from the unpublished memoirs of her grandfathers, recorded tapes of her grandmother, testimonials from living relatives from that generation, historical archives, diaries, interviews and so on, Mishal Husain revisits the lives of the people who witnessed the British raj, the Japanese invasion during World War II, and India’s Independence from the front row. She takes us back to the times when people kept records of socio-political events that affected their lives and relationships in the hope that those would one day be significant for a historian to look into.
Husain’s identity as a BBC journalist of Pakistani descent makes the book more interesting for it showcases the lives of the people of India who had moved to Pakistan to create a new nation, “a homeland for Muslims… where people were free to go to temples and churches”, under the leadership of Muhammad Ali Jinnah. Her grandfathers, Syed Shahid Hamid (maternal) and Mumtaz Husain (paternal), served in the army as a soldier and a medic, respectively. Shahid, brought up in Lucknow, rose to work closely with the then commander-in-chief of the British Indian army, Claude Auchinleck, whom he describes as a man who didn’t receive his due from the Empire. Fondly called The Auk, he played a crucial role in getting Shahid’s family across the border after the Partition.
Tahirah, Husain’s maternal grandmother, born and brought up in Aligarh, observes that the demand for a separate nation-state could have been avoided if India treated its Muslim minority with respect and accepted its ordinary demands. She adds that if it were M.K. Gandhi instead of Jawaharlal Nehru, things could have been better between the two nations. After all, Nehru looked at Pakistan as seceding from India while Jinnah imagined the birth of two equal states from one. Her tapes provide a picture of the heartbreak across the nation during India’s Partition that witnessed people’s migration, loss of ancestral homes, as well as a dream to remain connected with all those they left behind. The connections were severed as tension rose between the nations; whatever did survive saw its demise during the 1965 war.
Mumtaz expresses emotions the most; passages from his memoir are full of tenderness amidst turbulent times. Hailing from Multan, he fell in love with Mary (an Anglo-Indian Catholic) in Lahore where he was studying to become a doctor and she to be a nurse. He writes, “My heart nearly stopped with excitement to see the sight of my dreams and desires on the platform…” Just like the author, the reader longs to know more about the stoic and dedicated Mary of mixed parentage, one who was fierce enough to demand a marriage without conversion and dedicated enough to cross boundaries with her husband knowing she might not meet her family in Anankepalle again knowing she hasn’t been accepted by Mumtaz’s family yet.
Husain meshes the threads of political and personal narratives to bring forth the lives of the founding generation of a free India and Pakistan while also empathetically presenting political figures from Jinnah to Mountbatten, consolidating the personal accounts with archival records and interviews that make Broken Threads an important addition to the growing oeuvre of Partition literature.
