Midnight's Furies.

• Author: Dorschner, Jon P.
• Position: Midnight's Furies: The Deadly Legacy of India's Partition - Book review

Book: Midnight's Furies: The Deadly Legacy of India's Partition by Nisid Hajari, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, New York, New York, 2015, ISBN 978-0-547-66921-2, 328 pp., $28.00 (Hardcover), $14.99 (Kindle). Reviewed by Dr. Jon P. Dorschner

It is a well-documented historical fact that independence of India from British rule in 1947 went terribly awry. It resulted in unprecedented carnage on a massive scale. Millions of Indians were displaced in what was at that time among the largest incidences of ethnic cleansing yet witnessed. The origin of the violence and suffering was the division of British India into two newly independent states. The state of India was a British creation. The British Empire united the region's many disparate states into a single nation. The Republic of India inherited this legacy. Pakistan was a totally new and distinctive state, created by the Muslim League, under the leadership of Muhammad Ali Jinnah, as a homeland for South Asian Muslims.

This traumatic series of events, called "partition" in the South Asian subcontinent, left a searing scar on subsequent generations of Indians, Pakistanis, and Bangladeshis. Midnight's Furies author Nisid Hajari takes the basic and familiar recitation of historical fact one step further. He attributes the destructive and non-functional India/Pakistan relationship of today to partition. He constructs a chain of causality in which the open wounds generated by partition set up a series of bilateral disasters that prevent India and Pakistan from normal interaction. He further argues that the negative India/Pakistan relationship has prevented the entire South Asian region from progressing and fueled a wave of Islamic terrorism with worldwide repercussions.

This book was of particular interest to me because my co-author Thom Sherlock and I have researched how these events are taught to schoolchildren in India and Pakistan. We documented that the governments of both countries have routinely manipulated the facts regarding partition to serve their own political ends. Pakistan is a rarity on the world stage, as it is a state conceived as a "homeland" for a particular religious group, a distinction that it shares with Israel. Pakistan is also a quasi theocracy in that it is a self-declared "Islamic Republic" and allows its religious leaders wide latitude in the governing of the state and the drafting of its law code. Although the modern nation state of India is a British...