The sudden rise of India over the past few years has taken many western observers by surprise. The Indian economy has quadrupled in size in a generation. Its ancient reputation as a centre for mathematics and scientific skills remains intact, and Indian software engineers increasingly dominate Silicon Valley. India now has the largest population in the world and is clearly on its way to becoming the third economic superpower. Its economy overtook the UK last autumn and will overtake Germany and Japan within the next decade. The only questions are whether it is the US, China or India that will dominate the world by the end of this century, and what sort of India that will be.
Little of this would have surprised our ancestors who first sailed to India with the East India Company at the time of Shakespeare. India then had a population of around 150 million – about a fifth of the world’s total – and was producing about a quarter of global manufacturing; indeed, in many ways it was the world’s industrial powerhouse and the leader in manufactured textiles. The idea that India was ever a poor, famine-struck country is a relatively recent one, dating only from the period of British rule: historically, South Asia was always famous as the richest region of the globe, whose fertile soils gave two harvests a year and whose mines groaned with mineral riches.
Today India has returned to its traditional place at the centre of world affairs. In less than a century, it has moved from a distant colony of the British crown to its current status, where it is courted by Washington and confident enough to dictate the terms of its relationship with the US. Anyone wishing to understand how it did this would do well to read Joya Chatterji’s wonderful new book. With clarity, wit and charm, she tells the story of the subcontinent’s recent history in a fluent sweeping arc that takes us from the great anti-colonial rebellion of 1857 to the rise of the BJP’s muscular Hindu nationalism.
Chatterji is professor of South Asian history at the University of Cambridge, a fellow of the British Academy and editor-in-chief of the scholarly journal Modern Asian Studies. Up to now she has built her formidable academic reputation on her admired microstudies on partition and especially her scholarly tome Bengal Divided: Hindu Communalism and Partition 1932-1947. But Shadows at Noon is quite different from anything she has written before: wide-angled and hugely ambitious, but also highly personal and pleasingly discursive. It is a book she has clearly enjoyed writing and, as a result, it is wonderfully enjoyable to read.
The first 200 pages are a gallop through 150 years of South Asian history, taking us from the beginnings of the Raj and the formation of the Congress party as a gentleman’s debating club, through independence and partition, to the death of Indira Gandhi in 1984 and the road that led, for better or worse, to Modi’s India. This section is a brilliant introduction to modern Indian history and is the foundation on which the rest of the book is built.
It then heads off in a variety of quite unexpected tangents, embracing highly personal thematic essays on nationhood, food, cinema and the South Asian diaspora. Throughout, Chatterji’s tone is non-academic and conversational, at times even chatty. “Bear with me while we take a brief glance back,” she writes at one point. “I speak as a Bengali here,” she writes elsewhere.
She charges down a whole series of unexpected rabbit holes to discuss, for example, the Bengali love of fish, which extends to eating their heads and relishing their eyes and brains. She writes with enthusiasm and warmth about her favourite South Asian novels, so that Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy is used to illustrate a discussion about Holi and Mohammed Hanif’s Our Lady of Alice Bhatti is introduced to talk about the survival of untouchability in modern Pakistan: “These [people] will make you clean their shit and then complain that you stink.” An epilogue is given over to an enthusiastic discussion of her favourite South Asian movies.
There are many loving vignettes of Chatterji’s Indian childhood: we hear the air raid sirens she listened to as a girl growing up in an India at war with Pakistan, as well as the morning call of the peacocks and the evening howl of jackals at night in her parents’ house on the frontiers of 1960s Delhi. We follow her to her boarding school in Dehradun, where two Brahmin girls are sitting on “a low stone wall, swinging their skinny brown legs”, eating ice lollies, but one cannot finish the other’s “because it is jootha, touched by the saliva of another… Even though it is special for the 1970s – Kwality’s, no less – I am repelled at the thought of eating it. Both of us watch it melt, as if under a spell, unable to prevent this tragedy.”
Chatterji has lived and taught in British universities for most of her adult life and her point of view is very much that of a brilliant, exiled Bengali intellectual. While her publishers are touting Shadows at Noon as “the first comprehensive history of South Asia over the entire 20th century”, at times it more closely resembles a memoir, with India seen from a distance, through a nostalgic rear-view mirror.
It makes a perfect companion volume to Ramachandra Guha’s acclaimed history of post-independence South Asia, India After Gandhi, which has established itself as the most reliable introduction to contemporary India. Where it differs is not just in its thematic form: it has a much broader focus, including both Pakistan and Bangladesh, and is remarkably inclusive, with a persistent focus on those on the margins, especially the Dalits and India’s Muslims, who alone made up “over one-third of the British Indian Empire until 1947”.
Throughout, the author tries to understand how the hugely diverse South Asia of the 19th century polarised into the three nations that once made up British India. Exactly “how did we become ‘Indians’, ‘Pakistanis’ and ‘Bangladeshis’?” she asks again and again. Chatterji’s “compulsion to understand” has resulted in a wonderfully original, genre-defying work that is sure to become a classic.
• Shadows at Noon: The South Asian Twentieth Century by
Joya Chatterji is published by Vintage (£30). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
