Broken Threads: My Family From Empire to Independence
By Mishal Husain
Fourth Estate
ISBN: 978-0008531683
336pp.

BBC broadcaster Mishal Husain’s magnificent chronicle, Broken Threads: My Family From Empire to Independence, defies neat categorisation — it is a bittersweet story of love, loss and recovery.

Surrounded by friends and colleagues with long histories of belonging in Britain, Husain traces the broken threads of the lives of her beloved grandparents, parents and, consequently, her life. She unravels a multi-rooted, multilingual, and multi-religious past in places as far flung as Punjab, Ireland, the eastern coast of South India, Uzbekistan, Kashmir, India and Pakistan.

Husain’s prose has the same stylistic poise and biting clarity as her speech. The result is an unputdownable book that reads like a novel, set against the backdrop of an authoritative history of the endgame of empire. The Partition of the British Indian empire — along religious lines into the two nation states of Muslim-majority Pakistan, and Hindu-majority India with avowedly secular claims — remains an open wound.

Throughout the narrative, there is a subterranean charge of a past, where difference erupts but is accommodated. Husain deftly weaves in varied sources to signpost her views on matters critical to her story. From a poignant BBC documentary, the public intellectual Eqbal Ahmed discusses Partition, the event, and religious nationalism, the ideas that caused the bloodletting. He concludes that a generation of leaders chose nationalism, which “is an ideology of difference.”

Broadcaster Mishal Husain’s memoir about her multi-rooted, multilingual and multi-religious family reads like a novel set against the backdrop of an authoritative history of the endgame of the British empire

While Indian nationalists are held to account, Husain quotes the British civil servant Penderel Moon’s Divide and Quit for a searing indictment of the bungled up transition, from empire to the two independent nation states drenched in a bloodbath of religious violence.

Objects can trigger memories. In this instance, a border cut out from an old sari and appliquéd on a shawl, gifted to Husain at her wedding, set her on her quest. The sari was one among several gifted to his sisters-in-law by her maternal grandfather’s family, at his wedding.

Husain locates her grandparents in the middle class. Their journeys mirror the global pathways charted for many. In colonial India, education in English was a marker of class. English was mandatory for professions such as law and medicine, and higher echelons of government service.

To enter the military as an officer, physical fitness and good English were the only requirements after high school, with the stamp of a family background from castes and communities approved — and in part created — by the British. The linguistic stamp of the colonial past continues to shape class and economic hierarchies in South Asia.

Husain’s account enables an exploration of what the scholar Margrit Pernau describes as “the plurality and ambiguity of Muslim identities.” Islam is thus, historicised, contextualised and complicated. And, in the case of this book, because of Husain’s paternal grandmother, so is what it means to be a Christian and an Anglo-Indian.

Husain’s paternal grandparents’ story begins like a Mills & Boon doctor and nurse romance. In 1937, Mumtaz Husain (1920-2007), born in Multan into a socially conservative — once Hindu now Muslim — Rajput family, at 17 went to train as a doctor at King Edward’s Medical College, Lahore.

In July 1940, he met Mary Quinn (1922-1984), training as a nurse in Mayo Hospital. Mary was born in Narsipatnam on the east coast of South India to Francis Quinn, an Irish farmer of comfortable means, and Mariamma, a Telugu lady who converted from Hinduism to Christianity.

For Mumtaz it was love at first sight. He struggled to woo Mary, but she began to return his love, and they married in Lahore in 1942. She was 20, and he 22; she remained a devout Catholic all her life, and he a Muslim.

Mary’s childhood in Anakapalle in today’s Andhra Pradesh comes alive in accounts shared with Hussain by her great aunt Anne, Mary’s younger sister, whom Mishal met in England. She had visited Mary and Mumtaz in Pakistan, as indeed did Mariamma.

Mary was lucky that she had Imtiaz, Mishal’s father — her first child — in Anakapalle, with her mother and sisters around. Her fifth son was born in Pakistan in 1948 — she knew but a smattering of Urdu, living in a new country — her family far away on the south-eastern coast of India, separated by the tragic absurdity of Indo-Pak relations, as Mumtaz increasingly strayed off to stag nights.

And then there was Rahima, Mumtaz’s first cousin, his late uncle’s daughter, whom his parents ordered him to marry, in a practice of vatta satta (in Punjabi — two siblings in exchange marriages to two siblings), with aims of retaining property, caste and religious purity. Mumtaz’s only sibling, Sakina was married off to Rahima’s brother.

Such marriages, often forced, continue to happen across the world. Mumtaz did not comply. Without legal or religious standing, his family incarcerated Rahima in the family home as their son’s wife. In Mumtaz’s words, they “sacrificed the life of an innocent girl on the altar of a promise.”

If Mary is the heroine of this chronicle, Husain’s accomplished mother Shama’s mother, Tahirah (1920-2011) is the affective compass, who continues to guide Mishal’s everyday life — to the minutia of the ritual in which she lays her table.

Born in Aligarh, a nursery of South Asian Muslim modernism and nationalism, Tahirah had a go at medicine to please her doctor father, but gave up the challenge. Equally eloquent in Urdu and English, purdah is not a question the sophisticated Tahirah had to confront.

In 1940, she married Shahid Hamid (1911-1994), born and brought up in Lucknow in a milieu considered (arguably) the touchstone for refinement, decorum, sartorial style, cuisine, the performing arts and the Urdu language. There was more than a degree of consonance in the backgrounds of Husain’s maternal grandparents.

Shahid trained at Sandhurst in the 1930s. Between 1946 and I947, as Field Marshal Claude Auchinleck’s private secretary, he had a ringside view of the events around Partition. This connection meant that when the family opted for Pakistan, they had a comparatively safe relocation to Rawalpindi, where the couple spent their lives, and where Mishal and her brother Haider holidayed regularly.

Husain recounts her grandparents’ admiration of Jinnah, and their affinity with Pakistan. She, however, raises a counterfactual possibility of a more peaceful and viable denouement to the end of empire had Gandhi and Jinnah resolved matters rather than an uninformed Mountbatten, at Nehru’s behest.

To elucidate Mountbatten’s inexperience (his appointment contingent upon his relationship to the king), Husain relies upon a collection of letters written by a daughter, Barbara Swinburn, the wife of an Indian army officer to her mother. On Mountbatten’s closeness to Nehru, Swinburn writes, “He and the Viceroy are great buddies and Dickie [Mountbatten] almost eats out of his hand.”

In a history of the Muslim middle class, gender and the Partition of colonial India, Husain provides rare insights into her maternal grandparents’ mentor and friend — the Auk (Auchinleck) and calls for more research into his role. Furthermore, she underscores the camaraderie of military lives and families.

Perhaps, this might trigger research into how the social lives and values of the officers of the Pakistan army (now an institution with a grip on all aspects of life in Pakistan) have transformed across time.

The reviewer is a historian, a screenwriter, a translator and rights activist.

X: @NasreenRehman1

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, June 30th, 2024