OUR COMMON HISTORY

USING ARCHIVAL DATA AND ANECDOTES, THE BOOK PUTS THE SPOTLIGHT ON THE HETEROGENEOUS PAST OF SOUTH ASIAN NATIONS

- Pradip Kumar Datta

SHADOWS AT NOON:
The South Asian Twentieth Century
By Joya Chatterji
PENGUIN VIKING

Conjure for a moment the stern photographic image of Quaid-e-Azam dissolving into a liberal constitutionalist Congressman, co-author of a Hindu-Muslim alliance, falling in love with a Parsi heiress. Ruttie reciprocates Jinnah’s love by forsaking her family for him. Joya Chatterji’s Shadows at Noon weaves together hard archival data with (often surprising) anecdotes that open multiple windows into the heterogeneous past of the three nations of South Asia in (mainly) the twentieth century. The stories range from personal tales of national leaders, the lives of humble constables, adivasi, ‘lower castes’ and clerks to the protocols of middle-class gluttony and family relationships.

History is brought alive not least because the narrator unfolds her own life. It’s for a good reason. Her presence ties together historical facts with living memory. Shadows at Noon draws on Ernest Renan’s axiom that the nation is made from remembering—and forgetting. As child, Chatterji believed her cook, that everything in Pakistan was perverse. Yet she doted on Imran Khan, the cricketer. Later research betrayed her cook: the histories of the two countries, she learnt, were comparable. Chatterji dons the anthropologist’s hat with that of a historian. With her formidable scholarship and capacity for life experiences, she radically complicates the ‘them versus us’ story of homogeneous nations.