Shadows at Noon: The South Asian Twentieth Century

"The book is about India in the 20th century, which means taking it from the late Victorian period, when it had become an empire under Queen Victoria, through to its present form, which consists of three large nations—India, Pakistan and Bangladesh—important on a worldwide scale. That is not an easy task, because the history is crowded with agendas and assumptions. There is the assumption of Britain being a good imperial power or a very bad imperial power. There is the assumption that in 1947 a tragedy happened, Partition. As I read it, I was testing my own assumptions against these inherited ones and found the book extraordinarily fresh. It is written by a citizen of modern-day India, but she has examined her own assumptions, her own experience, and created something which I found surprising and new. There is perhaps an optimistic message behind the book, that despite all the tragedy of the history of the sub-continent in the 20th century, these are three countries which have much more in common than many of their leaders admit. Behind the rhetoric, they have quietly cooperated across borders. There’s the striking story of the subcontinent’s ability to feed itself in the 20th century. That’s remarkable and includes distributing water. It doesn’t sound dramatic—it’s not as dramatic as a war—but it’s absolutely essential to the way that India’s, Pakistan’s, and Bangladesh’s agriculture have been transformed from catastrophe under the British Raj into that enviable and absolutely necessary ability to feed their own people today. It’s very clever. Joya Chatterji is an old hand at writing high-class history. You don’t know what your readers know. And so underlying the surprising detail and the new perspective is that quiet sense of narrative and structure, which is really impressive, I think. As you say, there are absolute nodal points in this story which the reader needs to know. There’s 1947, there’s 1971 and you need the story built around that structure."