15. A Pakistani liaison officer shakes the hand of an Indian army officer after the announcement of a ceasefire in the Indo–Pakistan war. (Topfoto)
16. Indian troops advancing into East Pakistan in December 1971. (Getty Images)
17. Pakistan’s General Niazi signs the document of surrender at the end of the Bangladesh Independence War. (©Bettmann/CORBIS)
18. The Indian Herald’s supplement on Mrs Gandhi’s declaration of the Emergency. (Courtesy of the Indian Herald)
19. Indira Gandhi campaigning in Calcutta for the 1977 elections. (EE/AP/Press Association Images)
20. Sri Lankan Tamils training in southern India in 1986. (Topfoto/AP)
21. Young recruits undergoing training by the Tamil Tigers. (Topfoto/AP)
22. Sant Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale. (AP/Sondeep Shankar/AP/Press Association Images)
23. The Golden Temple of Amritsar during ‘Operation Bluestar’. (Topfoto/AP)
24. Kashmiris burn the Indian flag in March 1990. (Ajit Kumar/AP/Press Association Images)
25. Protesters against the Indian army’s presence in Srinagar. (Barbara Walton/AP/Press Association Images)
26. Militant VHP kar sevaks attack the Babri mosque in Ayodhya. (AFP/Getty Images)
27. Hindu youths clamber onto the domes of the Babri mosque. (AFP/Getty Images)
28. Mumbai under attack by jihadist gunmen in November 2008. (Punit Paranjpe/Reuters/Corbis)
29. The Golden Quadrilateral highway under construction near Kanpur. (Ed Kashi/VII/Corbis)
30. Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. (Mary Evans/SZ Photo/Scherl)
31. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. (AP/Topfoto)
32. General Ziaul Haq. (AP/Topham)
33. Benazir Bhutto. (PA/Topfoto)
34. Atul Behari Vajpayee. (Topham Picturepoint)
1. South Asia – physical
2. South Asia today
3. British India and the Princely States in 1947
4. North-East India and Bangladesh
5. Kashmir and Punjab
6. Political succession in South Asia, 1947–2014
I was six years old in 1947 when what was then British India won its independence. I vaguely recall the pomp and ceremony of the Delhi celebrations as filmed for Pathé News but have no recollection of seeing any coverage of the horrors of the Great Partition that followed. Pakistan I came across only in the classroom; it was not till nineteen years after Independence that I first visited what is now called South Asia.
Midnight’s Descendants is nevertheless a contemporary history. It spans my lifetime and has revived as many memories as questions. Since that first visit in 1966 I have been returning almost annually – as a journalist, documentary-maker, lecturer, writer of many books and taker of many holidays. In the process I have learned enough to know just how presumptuous this book is.
Contemporary history is itself fraught with pitfalls. It is, of course, a contradiction in terms: by definition, what is contemporary can’t be history. No record of the current can aspire to the detachment expected when writing of the past. Memory proves dangerously unreliable; impressions muddy the facts. A ready-made consensus does not exist in respect of many crucial developments, and access to the documentation on which later histories may be based is still embargoed. This book will probably be challenged and will certainly be superseded.
So why write it? The answer is simply that – both despite Partition and because of it – South Asia remains as distinct and crisis-prone a global entity as the Middle East (or ‘West Asia’, to South Asians). With a population greater than China’s, it is already the world’s largest market, and it may well host the world’s next superpower. In the past sixty-five years it has also staged at least five nasty wars and has more than once taken the world to the brink of nuclear conflagration. Yet its problems remain poorly understood, and its influence easily underrated. Studies of the region as a whole are surprisingly few. Visa restrictions limit travel and inhibit mutual exchange, much as prejudice limits mutual understanding. The outsider has a slight advantage here, which is my excuse for undertaking the book.
Over the years literally hundreds of friends and contacts have contributed to what follows. It would be invidious to attempt to list them; but one and all, I thank them. Sam Miller in Delhi and Philip Bowring in Hong Kong kindly read an early draft of the book. For their comments and encouragement I am enormously grateful, and I have enjoyed returning the compliment in respect of their own books. More immediately I want to record my debt to editors Lara Heimert and Sue Warga at Basic Books and Robert Lacey and Martin Redfern at William Collins. This is not by way of an authorial convention. Creative editors are a rare breed; so are patient ones. I have been blessed with four of the finest and most forbearing, and I thank them all most sincerely. For her still greater patience and unstinting support, and for her love, I am indebted to Amanda. But in her case thanks would be inappropriate and hopelessly inadequate. So I say no more.
John Keay
Argyll, 2013
Approaching Bengal from opposite directions, the Ganges and the Brahmaputra shy away from a head-on collision and veer south, their braided channels fraying and criss-crossing in a tangle of waterways that rob the parent rivers of their identities.