“Shadows at Noon: The South Asian Century” by Joya Chatterji

Joya Chatterji

South Asia is bound by a strong cultural currency. It is not uncommon to find restaurants run by Pakistanis and Bangladeshis in the diaspora marketed as serving “Indian” cuisine, freely expressing shared roots and ways of life. It is also not uncommon to find citizens of the three nations to welcome each other into their homes and endear them with great hospitality. Given this healthy cultural exchange, what is unusual is their common perception of each other’s political orientation as antithetical to theirs. In Shadows at Noon: The South Asian Century, historian Joya Chatterji investigates whether the region’s nation building practices are really all that different from each other’s.

A work of history of what was once British India (India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh), the book is aimed at South Asians themselves, who have been conditioned by their political leaders to think that they are different from their neighbors, with whom they are often seriously at odds. Chatterji finds instances from their pasts to show that they share a post-Partition present too, rather than just a past. While the instances she presents about a shared socio-cultural heritage or way of life are things that are very well-known to this audience, her discussions of the results of the process of nation building are particularly interesting.

For instance, Jawaharlal Nehru and Mohammad Ali Jinnah might be seen as very different personalities: the former has generally been seen as a believer in secularism and against partition of India while the latter was seen as someone who left no stone unturned to make the partition happen. Chatterji shows that a closer look at history shows they were quite similar: not just in the sense that both had nations to run but in the sense that their stand on how to handle the “others” in their respective nation states. Nehru’s India was for “Indians” rather than for specific communities that self-identified on the basis of religion. Chatterji writes:

 

Every native of the subcontinent had only one legitimate identity, and that was ‘Indian’. All other identities had to be cast aside in the cause of nation. These other ‘little’ identities … were forms of false consciousness: economic malaise disguising itself in religions, regional or casteist garbs, which had to be exposed in the cause of national unity.

 

Jinnah’s vision for Pakistan, Chatterji shows, wasn’t very different. When he was asked to safeguard the rights of the minority community of the Shias in Pakistan, he too couldn’t broaden his vision of a Muslim. His response:

 

The proper policy for the Shias is to join the League wholeheartedly. The League is not able to enforce justice and fair play between Musalman and Musalman whatever be his sect or section. The one thing alone that matters is that we are all Musalmans.

 

The moral of the story:

 

Paradoxically, therefore, the ‘two nations’ came to resemble each other ever more closely as partition approached … Jinnah and Jawaharlal, two men who despised each other, came to resemble each other all the more as they strove querulously to subdue those within ‘their own ranks’ who challenged their claim to speak for the ‘nation’ as a whole.

 

The two nations were also similar in the way they dealt with the influx of refugees. First, they promised to protect their minorities. Then, they sought to rescue “their” people from the other country. And then, they began to stop those who had migrated to the other side from returning.

 

Shadows At Noon: The South Asian Twentieth Century, Joya Chatterji (Bodley Head, May 2023)
Shadows At Noon: The South Asian Twentieth Century, Joya Chatterji (Bodley Head, May 2023; Viking India, July 2023; Yale University Press, November 2023)

The role played by the Indo-Pak bilateral “quiet diplomacy” is also not well known. The Calcutta Conference of 1948 had the diplomats of the two countries meet and jointly devise ways to handle the post-Partition issues related to migration and displacement. Together, they resolved “to protect life and property of minorities” and “to warn government servants against dereliction of duty towards minorities, towards creation of fear and apprehension in their minds.”

Similarly, both countries were found to be voting in similar ways in the UN General Assembly. Both were more or less non-aligned throughout the Cold War. Both turned to the US for food aid, under the PL-480 scheme in the 1950s and thereby invited Cold War politics in their midst. Both liberalized their economies more or less at the same time.

They have been fighting similar battles internally but these things are not so obvious to their citizens. For instance, the rise of linguistic identity politics does not occur to many South Asians who select language as a marker of belongingness. The Bangla movement in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) and Telugu movement in India erupted in 1952. It is not just the idea of resistance that is similar. What is also striking is that South Asians themselves defy the idea of a homogenous nation united by one linguistic identity.

And yet, the same South Asians do not seem mindful of these similarities. On the contrary, they are readily co-opted by nationalist propaganda that seeks to make the neighbor look evil. The figure of the “illegal” Bangladeshi migrant or the Pakistani “terrorist”, for instance, appears in quite a lot of political campaigning in India.

Chatterji’s book is very dense: individual chapters could stand as mini monographs! While it very nobly educates a scholar of South Asian Studies in bringing different strands of South Asian history together, it might not be accessible to a general reader—the very reader it seems to be targeted at. Its wonderful scholarship might however inspire others to let the message spread.


Soni Wadhwa lives in Mumbai.