Midnight’s Descendants: A History of South Asia Since Partition

South Asia specialist Keay (India: A History) tackles a subject too often swept under the rug in the interest of fashioning coherent national narratives. The partition of India and Pakistan, haphazardly implemented in a matter of weeks with no contingency planning and little thought of the future, deeply scarred the region in ways that few political actors, even today, are willing to admit. The amount of human suffering the event caused was almost unprecedented outside of wartime. “War,” Keay writes, “even civil war, might have been more manageable than the internecine strife that engulfed large parts of both India and Pakistan.” In engaging if occasionally cloying prose, he sketches the conflicting paths traveled by these two nations since their tumultuous birth. One recurring theme is the insufficiency of territorial sovereignty to provide order in so complicated a region; in the borderlands, it is often difficult for a visitor to discern whether a particular village belongs to Pakistan, India, or Bangladesh, and cross-border ties are often stronger and more meaningful than those connecting disparate areas of the same country. Lines on a map came to shape the destiny of entire populations, as “[a]reas, not individuals, became the currency of Partition, districts rather than households the unit of exchange.” (Mar.)