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The 12 Books of Christmas | Mishal Husain on Family, Empire and Why Partition Still Matters
01:06:07
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- [00:00]
Connor Boyle
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- [01:46]
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- [02:14]
Connor Boyle
Welcome to Intelligence Squared where great minds meet. I'm Head of Programming Connor Boyle. We're looking back at some of our favorite books of the year in our 12 Books of Christmas Christmas. Today's episode is with journalist and broadcaster Michelle Hussain. Hussain joined us alongside Razia Iqbal to discuss her family's story at the end of the British Empire in India. These themes come from her book Broken My Family From Empire to Independence. Let's go to the episode now.
- [02:52]
Thank you very much Connor. It's lovely to hear so many of you. Can't see you very well at the moment, but thank you all so much for coming. It's an absolute pleasure to be here on the stage with Michelle. We'd never done an event together. I don't think we haven't.
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Michelle Hussain
I'm being interviewed by professor iqval. I hadn't quite thought this through fully, Conor, until you introduced her in that way, because I obviously know Razia as my longtime.
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Connor Boyle
And you're going to be interviewed, which is not a comfortable place for you, I don't think.
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Michelle Hussain
Be gentle with me, everyone. I'm not sure I can ask for that, really.
- [03:25]
Connor Boyle
People always say about very well known people, oh, they don't need an introduction. But actually I was thinking that's a bit mad. They do need an introduction. Michelle Hussain is a broadcaster journalist for how many decades now? Two and a bit Decades.
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Michelle Hussain
Two and a bit, yeah.
- [03:42]
Connor Boyle
Presents the Today program on Radio 4, the 10 o' clock news on BBC1. Many of you will have seen her just astonishingly control seven leaders from the parties not so long ago. And she is also going to be doing the big debate as we approach the election on 26 June between Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer. So there's that to look forward to. But we're here today to talk about this, which I think is a really special book because it does a thing about big history in just the most captivating way. It's the story of her four grandparents through both empire and independence. And that just sounds like a fairly straightforward sentence for those who don't know how traumatic and devastating that transition was from empire to independence. So it really is a vast landscape. And what she has done so brilliantly, I think, is to capture the stories of individuals that aren't just her grandparents. And we're going to talk about all of that tonight. Michelle, first of all, I don't know if you remember, but after you finished writing your last book, you told me that you would never write another book again.
- [04:59]
Michelle Hussain
I don't remember that.
- [05:01]
Connor Boyle
I remember feeling it for sure, but.
- [05:04]
Michelle Hussain
I don't remember saying it. But actually today I saw that Matthew d' Ancona did this review and in it he said, I look forward to the subsequent volumes. And this sort of, again, this chill passed over me. And I also thought, I hope my husband doesn't read this because honestly, the idea of subsequent volumes will fill him with horror as well. But this has been quite an epic. It's sort of part family saga and part there's some quite tough politics and tough periods of history in it. But I felt all of that was true to my family's life because they lived against this backdrop of major events that changed the course of their lives. But obviously, obviously amid all of that, life goes on. You have Marriages and children and divorces and, you know, every other aspect of the human condition.
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Connor Boyle
Well, let's go back to the beginning, then, and tell us the impulse to write it then, given that. I mean, it's been in the making for three years or so.
- [06:03]
Michelle Hussain
Yes. And there's sort of. I knew that my mother's family in particular had seen some extraordinary times around just before and indeed after 1947, because my mother's parents, Shahid and Thyra, he worked for the last British commander in chief of the Indian army, as it happened, in the 18 months before independence. And Claude Auchinleck, Field Marshal Auchinleck, who had been a great Second World War general and was in the hierarchy of British India, the second most important person in British India. There's first the Viceroy and then the commander in chief of the Indian army. So he lived in the house that, for all of you who know Delhi, Tin Murti Bhavan, it was the home of Nehru as Prime Minister of India for many years and is today museum. So that was Auchinleck's house. So I knew that my grandfather Shahid had published a partition diary, so I knew they'd lived through amazing times. And I talked to my grandmother Thyra, quite a lot about it. And then, so I think somewhere I thought I'd probably maybe write about them and that period in history. And then I thought, actually, I've got an Anglo Indian grandmother who was mixed race, and my father's family had a story to tell, too. And as I thought more and more about it and read more of the bits and pieces of writing they'd left behind, and also listened to some tapes my grandmother had left behind, she said at one point, my generation was not really complete for a long time afterwards, meaning after 1947. And I thought her generation, and I thought, these are the people who in Britain we would call the wartime generation, and in America you'd call the greatest generation. And they were the founding generation of independence in South Asia. And I thought, actually, there's a story to tell about that group of people who were born in colonial India, who, I think, until the 1940s didn't think that independence would come, certainly didn't think it would come so soon, perhaps didn't even think it would come in their lifetimes. Actually, even at that point, they certainly were born in a time when the British Empire looked like it was. Was not going anywhere. 1931 was the inauguration of New Delhi as the capital of British India. Everything that we see, the Lutyens buildings and the Layout, all of that was only inaugurated in 1931. And 16 years later the empire in India was gone. So that period in the 1930s and 40s, my grandparents generation were young adults and then newlyweds and parents of young children. And this huge seismic shift during which they chose to be citizens of Pakistan did involve a great deal of loss for three out of the four of them who were born in the territory of present day India.
- [08:50]
Connor Boyle
The title of the book, Broken Threads is, it seems to me a metaphor for the whole story. But it also relates very specifically to a specific thing.
- [09:01]
Michelle Hussain
So.
- [09:02]
Connor Boyle
So tell us the story of the wedding gift which you are for our pleasure wearing tonight.
- [09:08]
Michelle Hussain
Yes. So this shawl, some of you might have read the book already because it's been out for a week. So those of you who have, right. In the introduction I mentioned being given this as a wedding present by my mother's cousin Sharmin. And when she gave it to me, she said, this shawl, this bit of embroidery is the border of asari. And that sari was given to my mother, that is my great aunt, on the occasion of my grandparents wedding in 1940 when they got married. The bridegroom, my grandfather Shahid, he had five sisters and their parents gave all five of them a sari for the wedding. And this particular cousin of my mother's was the daughter of one of those recipients of the sari. And the sari had frayed badly over the years. But just the border, which is the sort of most robust part of a sari designed to, you know, when you're walking, it's not going to be destroyed. And so the border was still intact. And she took it off and she had it stitched onto this very plain woolen shawl. And she gave it to me as this incredible actual thread that linked my wedding in 2003 to this 1940 wedding of my grandparents. And I thought this was the most beautiful and evocative wedding present I was given. And as I started to think about my family, I thought it's even more extraordinary that I have this because in I think the autumn of 1947, Sharmeen, that cousin of my mother's, was a small girl in Lucknow in India living with her grandmother because her mother had died a few months before independence and her father was working somewhere else. So she was in the care of her grandmother. And they all left Lucknow as law and order deteriorated. They all left Lucknow in a great hurry. It was a household of women, my great grandmother, various other female relatives, including Sharmeen. As a young child and they just took what they could carry, got the train to Bombay and a boat to Karachi. And I thought to myself, in the midst of all of that, someone in the family grabbed this sari and thought, this is Jameela sari and her daughter Sharmeen should have it one day. And I thought there are sort of multiple reasons why. I'm just amazed that this has survived. But you know, Razia, as you know, there's so much like fabric is such a part of Asian women's lives, right? It's like it's our heritage. It's what we inherit from our mothers. It's the saris, the kurtas, the shawls, whatever it is. And so, yes, there are sort of metaphorical threads, threads to the past. But I think also fabric is, you know, resonant and important personally and actually the story of South Asia politically as well. If you think about Gandhi and all of the campaigning that he did on India should be self sufficient. You shouldn't wear imported British cloth. Ideally, you should spin your own yarn and make your own fabric.
- [12:03]
Connor Boyle
Let's talk about the process of writing this book because you alluded to the sources that you had. So both of your grandparents, both of your grandfathers wrote books. So Mumtaz wrote an unfinished memoir, I think.
- [12:22]
Michelle Hussain
Unfinished. And unpublished.
- [12:23]
Connor Boyle
And unpublished. And Shahid wrote a book that was published, but you also had, in your grandmother Thyra, you had these tapes. So let's talk a little bit about the fact that you had this kind of rich archival family, archival source that you tapped into. How did you think about starting to tackle that?
- [12:49]
Michelle Hussain
Well, some of this material I had looked at before, certainly my grandfather Shahid's Partition diary was published in 1986 when I was 13 and I was at boarding school in England and I was the only member of my family who was in the country at the time. And I was hauled out of boarding school to attend his book launch, about which the most important thing I remember was that his publisher was the husband of Giddy Cooper, which age 13, I thought was the best possible thing about this book and the only really relevant thing to my life.
- [13:24]
Connor Boyle
And so you'd read Fear of Flying, but you hadn't quite mastered your grandfather's.
- [13:30]
Michelle Hussain
But when I did come to read it, it's full of the. What's amazing is it's a diary of what was happening when. And, you know, some really extraordinary figures. He sits in the room when Gandhi comes to meet Auchinleck and talks to him. And my grandfather is the private sector. He's sitting in the room. So there's some amazing detail there, but very little about my grandmother, very little about the three children, including my mother. And so I was like, you know, like, where's everyone else? What are you thinking? When are you deciding which and how are you deciding which country you are going to go to? There's none of that. And then my other grandfather, Mumtaz, just in his retirement, he became a widower at a relatively young age and he was retired and he needed to occupy himself and he just started, you know, my father, I remember, gave him a PC, this must have been in the late 80s. And he wrote, you know, and his, the file he left on his computer when he died and my uncle saved it thankfully. But it just starts with saying essentially, I don't really know why I'm doing this because I don't think anyone in my family is particularly interested in the story of my life. But I'm going to write it down in the hope that one day it tells my children and grandchildren and future great grandchildren what made their existence possible. And the thing is that he actually, what he put together, the unpublished and the published, went really well together in the end because what Mumtaz did was paint a whole picture of the social fabric in which he grew up in the southern part of Punjab in a city called Multan. And he was born into really a very simple conservative Muslim family of the time, middle class, in a very simple, modern brick, traditionally built house in the old city of Multan. And he describes the way that, how close they live to each other. It's a joint family system. So brothers and their wives and children are all under the same roof and behind a curtain, you know, he can hear his aunt giving birth and you know, all these kinds of like they're so close to life and death because it all happens in the four walls of the house. And then he also describes his mother living in Pardah and what that actually meant, exactly what she wore, what the procedure was when she wanted to leave the house, how she. Any time they went out of Multan, which was the only time she could remove her burqa in public, she would fling it off as soon as she could and her husband would look at her really disapprovingly and basically want her to keep it on for longer until they got right out. And I thought he's actually, he's like the perfect journalist of his time. He's observing and he's writing things down. But I'd only ever sort of dipped into These. And then I went back and my grandmother Tyra was a very. Was a very sensitive woman and who realized later in her life that a lot of things, she had sort of seen extraordinary things, but she was a 27 year old at the time of independence, and she said I was too immature at the time to realize what was happening around me. And later in life she wanted to write it down, didn't get very far, but did record some audio tapes.
- [16:42]
Connor Boyle
Right. So we'll go back to the audio tapes in a moment. But what I think is so typical of you, and I'm sure you had a lot to say about this, the two pictures on the front are of your two grandmothers. And we've just spent the last five minutes talking about your grandfathers who had the access or gave you the access into these stories. And I think it's really significant that you actively choose to put the grandmothers on the store. On the COVID of the book.
- [17:09]
Michelle Hussain
Yes. And the hardest one was my grandmother Mary, who died when I was 11. And. And so a lot of what I knew about her I gleaned through the lens of my grandfather, either because through our conversations or what he'd written down. And that is obviously his side of the story. Not that I think her side of the story would have been so different. But for example, she has an unusual background in that her father was Irish, part of Irish emigration which reached India in the 19th century, as it was did so many other parts of the world. And he and I tell this story early on in the book. It's slightly complicated and doesn't necessarily reflect that well on my great grandfather, but he married a much younger woman who was born a Hindu and then converted to Catholicism. And Mary, my grandmother, was the eldest child of that union. There were six children in all. And they lived with tremendous hardship because of their circumstances when she was growing up. And she then went to train as a nurse on the other side of India in 1940, which is how she met my grandfather Mumtaz, who was a medical student. So they then made their home in Pakistan after independence. And my grandfather's description of it is like, yes, initially my family didn't accept her. That was very bad of them. It took a long time. She was amazing. But eventually everyone was reconciled. But actually, I know for a fact it was more complicated than that. Not least because years later, even in my early childhood, my mother remembers Mary, her mother in law, saying to her, I still worry that Mumtaz's family are still unhappy about our marriage and would still Rather that he had married someone else. Actually his cousin. I mean, she was in her late 50s by then, so. So, you know, I was just conscious and I did talk a lot to. Mary has a surviving sibling, my great aunt Anne, who's 99 years old, God bless her, lives in Oldham, who lives in Oldham and is about to have her 100th birthday next month. But I just tried as hard as I could to get Mary in her own words, or at least Mary through her own family, rather than always seeing her through the lens of her husband. And actually, my father died a few years ago, but my two other uncles were actually, were very good on this and were very honest with me about, you know, what they saw in their childhoods.
- [19:36]
Connor Boyle
I mean, it was. It's a beautiful, captivating love story between Mumtaz and Mary. But as you say, neither side of the. I mean, not her family and not his family really accepted it because. Well, two reasons, because she was a Christian, but also because he was promised elsewhere.
- [19:56]
Michelle Hussain
Yes, her family came round to it much, much sooner than his did. I think they were not. I think they actually got over the Muslim part relatively quickly. I think the part that worried them more, first of all, was that times were really hard and, you know, there was very little money in that family. And Mary has, you know, gone to train as a nurse and then got married to my grandfather, who is not qualified as a doctor at the time. They get married and they start having children. Soon afterwards, she drops out of her nurse training. He's not yet a doctor. This is not a great combination from the point of view of my great grandmother, who was struggling to bring up six children and who's this eldest child was becoming a nurse and about to, you know, be okay. And so I think she was, you know, there's definitely a sort of like, how are they going to support each other or how is he going to support her? Actually, that is a big part of her issues with it.
- [20:56]
Connor Boyle
And when you discovered the tape that your other grandmother had made, partly she made them because she wanted to bring her husband back to life for herself, if you like. But also she was obviously acutely aware that he was not just at the center of things, but in so many instances had a ringside seat as history was being made. When you were listening to that voice, this is a grandmother that you knew. How did that feel?
- [21:28]
Michelle Hussain
It felt quite extraordinary. And that, you know, Taira was the grandparent. I knew the best, she and Mumtaz, So my mother's mother and my father's father because they lived the longest. But Tara and I talked a lot about. You know, she talked to me about India. And I remember her saying to me, you never saw what we left behind. And she meant what we left behind in India because both of those grandparents, that was where they grew up. Aligarh and Lucknow, which are. Aligarh is very close to Delhi, and Lucknow is a bit further away, but in that same geographical area of the Gangetic plain of North India. And so she had. So I could have just about done this book purely relying on my memories of her and what she told me, the story of her journey to safety in September 1947. She had told me herself, but of course, the tapes were amazing because it's her in her own words, her voice, which I hadn't heard for ages. And it's credit to my mother because my mother, I think probably also partly to keep her occupied when my grandfather died in 1993, had got her this tape recorder and first recorded her and then said, you know, when you're on your own sometime you could. You could record yourself. And I can sort of hear my grandmother. So you press record and play and then sort of clear her throat and take a deep breath, and then she comes out with these complete sentences. I think I've got a couple of quotes here, but I realized that, you know, at one point she said we had learned to live with each other over centuries. This is when she's talking about Hindus and Sikhs and Muslims and the society that she knew in the north of India. And then this was the bit that really made me think, in certain ways, people of my generation were not really complete for a long time because we were used to a pattern of life, friends made and kept, despite prejudices of life like religion or nationality. But these things don't matter. The human values do. And at another point, she said partition was a sad, sad era. Not because India was being partitioned, although that too was a tragedy, I think. But the way it happened was tragic and to the eternal shame of the people of India and Pakistan. That big tragedy has been followed by others. So she was really very eloquent. But interestingly, that's her verdict, that the partition of India was a tragedy. I don't think her husband would have said that. I don't think my grandfather Shahid would have said that. And I think, you know, I think he would have been like, I'm a patriot. This is the country I chose. You know, for better or worse, that's.
- [24:05]
Connor Boyle
But presumably also because it would have been difficult for them to have displayed those indefinitely.
- [24:12]
Michelle Hussain
Yes. And I've touched on this a bit. And for those of you I know there are people here who know Pakistan, but, you know, this founding generation, it didn't take long. And I think the death of Jinnah only a year after independence was an absolute tragedy for Pakistan. And there was no one of his caliber, really, who was the obvious sort of next founding father. Although Liaqat Ali Khan, who was the first prime minister of Pakistan, was also an extraordinary individual who then was assassinated a few years later. So Pakistan really had a terrible time with its early leaders. And what happened to two notable ones? But she. Sorry, where.
- [24:57]
Connor Boyle
Well, let me ask you another question about this kind of ringside seat that both your, both Shahid and Tyra had. Because one of the things that is so interesting about your choices in writing the book in the way that you did, because if you started out thinking, well, this was going to be a much smaller story, and then it becomes this bigger story, it doesn't surprise me at all that it became the bigger story, because your intellect as a journalist is the thing that comes to the fore when you're looking at the decision makers. And it feels to me like that propelled you in another direction, not just because your grandfather had a ringside seat, but that you were deeply embedded and involved in that story.
- [25:43]
Michelle Hussain
I certainly, because so much my work is in political journalism, I certainly could not approach this without thinking about the decision making of the time, the politics and. And how those decisions would be made. One of the conclusions I realized was just how few hands those decisions were in. You know, essentially on the British side, it was really only the Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, and the Viceroy who were making those decisions. Not even Claude Auchinleck, the second most important person supposedly in British India was. He wasn't privy to many of those.
- [26:18]
Connor Boyle
In fact, Mountbatten found him quite irritating.
- [26:21]
Michelle Hussain
Yes. And they certainly didn't have a good working relationship. And you know that I think that had very serious consequences. But I think one of the thing was I needed to. There were times when I really wanted. I was really flinching from, like, getting so deep into the history. But I thought, I can't understand these people, these four people and their generation, if I don't understand what was happening politically at every stage. So there's. The First World War is a very significant moment, after which, because of the numbers of Indians who served and died, it is really a moment where the British government realizes that we have to, you know, we have to do something that puts some kind of path towards greater autonomy or self rule. Remember, India is not even a dominion. It's not on a par with Canada or Australia. It doesn't have anything like that kind of system of government which has evolved for other major colonies by that stage, but that whole. And there was also an emphasis on Indianization, so opportunities for Indians within the civil service and within the army. And my grandfathers, Shahid and Mumtaz both benefited from that. So there are all these kinds of moves, but they tend to be behind Indian expectations at every stage of the process. But I felt unless I understood that whole trajectory of events, I couldn't put the lives of my four grandparents into any kind of context. And I've remembered now what I was going to say earlier about Pakistan in the 1950s is that the kind of narrative that developed very soon and which my grandparents really suffered from was that after a while the people who had sacrificed the most for Pakistan, and those were the people who had left homes in India and come to Pakistan to be part of founding the new country. And yes, some of those fled in fear of their lives and feeling they had nowhere else where they would be safe. But many others made a choice. And my grandparents, Shahid and Tara, were definitely those who made that choice. After a while though, it started to be that a narrative started to develop which was about the sons of the soil and those people who were born and bred in Sindh and in the part of Punjab that was Pakistan or in the northwest frontier or in Balochist. These are the true Pakistanis, you know, these are the people of the soil. And that left no place for the people whose roots were across the border. That started to be not something that you would emphasize, that was not something that would look good. And so I think that just meant that everything was downplayed. Your origins, your actual experience, experience of independence, your relatives that are across the border. It reduced your. I mean, it could have even affected my grandfather's career in the army. The fact that my grandmother Tahira went back and forth to see her parents. And indeed one of my grandfather's bosses, the army chief who later became President Ayub Khan, said to my grandfather Shahid, these trips of Tahra's to India, they don't look good. And he said to Ayub Khan, I'm sorry sir, I could never stop her from going to visit her parents. So, you know, there were all these kinds of dimensions they had to think about that the most basic and ordinary and understandable desire for human contact was.
- [29:48]
Connor Boyle
And he also went back to India.
- [29:49]
Michelle Hussain
Well, he didn't really see, and I think this is still the case, but as a serving army officer, he certainly, he couldn't go back. And then even as a retired army officer, it was difficult visas and how it looks. But he did at one point, I think in the late 1970s, there was a friendly Indian High Commissioner in Islamabad. And he said, and Shahid said to him, I would like to pray at my father's grave before I die. And his father had been buried in Lucknow in 1945. And he said, and I would like to take my eldest son and I'd like to take to go to India. And the High Commissioner, he had died quite young.
- [30:24]
Connor Boyle
He died when he was 61.
- [30:25]
Michelle Hussain
Yes, this is my great grandfather who died before independence. The Indian High Commissioner said, look, I can't issue you this visa in Islamabad, but if you're going abroad for any reason, you could pick up this visa somewhere else. And Shahid picked it up on a business trip to Hong Kong, came to India very, very briefly, did take my eldest uncle, did pray at his father's grave, but it wasn't the kind of trip where he could catch up with his old school friends or teachers or many of his relatives. And I found this letter from. I can't figure out if it was an old teacher or an old fellow pupil from Lucknow. But this person finds out that Shahid has been to Lucknow again after all these years and writes to him and says, I'm so sorry that you didn't have time to see me while you were here. It would have been wonderful to see you again. And I thought, I think it just was such a hurried trip. And how do you really, if you've been away for 30 years from the place where you were born and brought up and had all your education, how much time could you really ever have to catch up and soak up everything? But that was the only trip he made. And I think when he left India for Pakistan in 1947, no way would he ever have thought, I will only return here once in my life. I think that they had no sense that it was what was happening was going to be as definitive as it proved to be.
- [31:52]
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- [34:22]
Connor Boyle
That loss and the kind of cutting of ties was devastating for so many millions of people. Let's just back up a because we've kind of gone slightly ahead of ourselves in terms of the impact of partition, but the politics of it is really interesting and how you write about it in the book. Given Shahid's ringside seat, let's talk about a figure that you've already mentioned a couple of times, but somebody who you really highlight in the book, the Commander in Chief, Field Marshal Auchinleck orc as he's known to your family. Tell me why you wanted. I mean obviously he was a critical figure because he had access to everything that was coming out of London and therefore your grandfather had access to all of this documentation. Why did you want to highlight somebody that for many people is a forgotten figure and actually has been overshadowed even in Second World War history by Montgomery.
- [35:22]
Michelle Hussain
He, you see, I knew that he was, I mean my grandfather, I think it's fair to say, absolutely worshipped Ork. I think he was his boss for 18 months. But they stayed in touch for the rest of Auchinleck's life and he remarkably lived until 1981. He was the last of his generation. He outlived all his Second World War contemporaries and so they were very, very fond of him. I never met him, but my mother and her siblings, you know, whenever they were in England they would visit him and they were all very close, the family. So he was like this. You know, there used to be a picture of him in a silver frame in my grandparents living room. That's what it was. I remember seeing this picture and so I thought, look, I've got to research this man properly. I can't just take it as read that he was like so all out, amazing. And so he, Ork left his papers to the University of Manchester and I went and I sat in the amazing Rylands Library, John Ryland's library in the University of Manchester, as some of you might know it. And I looked through his archive and he now obviously this is the tour. When someone leaves their papers, they have taken out whatever they really don't want to see. But you still can, you know, you do get a really good sense of what there is. And there was one paper in particular that really jumped out at me and that was that when the Second World War was coming to an end and the fight against Japan, this is before the surrender and there were soldiers who had been part of the Indian army, who had fought in Burma and Malaya and Singapore, who after they'd been taken prisoner by the Japanese, joined the Japanese. And the circumstances of this are complicated. Some might have wanted to avoid the worst kind of punishment, some might have been induced. Others were strongly nationalistic. And the Japanese were saying, why were you fighting for the British? We will liberate your country, we will take you to Delhi, you will be able to overthrow them and, and liberate your fellow countrymen. So it's a very complex picture but as Japan is being defeated, these men of the Indian national army are being captured and brought back to Delhi. And Auchinlek, as commander in chief, had to decide what to do with them. And almost all of his British officers are saying, these are traitors. They are to be treated the same way that any British soldier or officer who went over to the Nazis in is to be treated. And, you know, these are very, very serious crimes. Now, some of these men were accused of brutality against fellow prisoners of war, but a lot of them were just simply arrested, and the charge would have been treason for joining the Japanese. And Auchinlec does begin a process of essentially sifting through all those prisoners, figuring out who is actually accused of serious crimes and who was simply part of the ina. And it's a long and difficult process. And in the end, some are convicted but have their sentences reduced or commuted. This is Auchinleck's decision. And others, eventually, as their fate is increasingly politicized in the run up to independence, eventually the whole judicial process comes to an end. And as it comes to an end, there's a memo in Auchinleck's archives, which was a private memo he wrote to his British officers. And he says, this is not for public consumption, but I want you to know why I have mitigated many of these sentences. And he says, I feel there is a much bigger picture than simply these men joining the Japanese, and it is not the same as Britain's joining the Nazis. He says most of these men found themselves inadequately led because British forces were so outclassed by the Japanese when. When those territories in East Asia started falling, they felt abandoned. They would not have shown disloyalty if the opportunity did not arise. And he says, most interestingly to me that I want you to search your hearts about their experiences in the Indian army, the times when they were racially discriminated, the times when people, even officers, wives, were discourteous to their wives. And he's essentially saying, I want you to think about their experience of racism. And I thought it was just an extraord. It showed extraordinary foresight. It was really a man ahead of his time, I think, because he said, the fact that these men are nationalists and by that really, you know, nationalism then essentially means patriotism, wanting freedom for your country. He said, I consider myself a patriot and, you know, essentially a patriot in your country. Just like we are British patriots, we must see these men in the same way. The fact that they eventually want us, the British, to leave India does not make them traitors in and of itself. And it's really an incredible document. And I do quote it at length in Broken Threads because I thought it was so interesting. And I thought, okay, now I get it. Now I understand why my grandparents thought that Auchinlech, you know, they held him in such high regard. And again, Thyra writes about him when they both met him in 1946, not long after Shahid's father had died, Auchinlek's marriage had fallen apart. His wife had gone off with a fellow officer. It was a big Delhi scandal in about 1945. So he'd had a hard time. He had no children. And so he and my mother's family really bond. And Thyro wrote, the orc became a father figure in our lives apart from Shahid working for him. We grew to know him and love him for so much that he possessed his sense of values, his integrity, his great ability. And he is one of the great Second World War generals. Because in 1943, which was. No, 1942, which was a really terrible year, the first half of 1942, East Asia is falling to the Japanese. Rommel is sweeping through North Africa. Auchinek is the one who holds Rommel at El Alamein. And it is a few months later that the second Battle of El Alamein, the one where Montgomery defeated Rommel, that is the one everyone remembers. But a few months before, it was Auchinlek who had held the Nazis in the Afrika Korps.
- [41:39]
Connor Boyle
It's one of the highlights of the book that you have chosen to remember someone who sort of feels like he had been forgotten in the kind of bigger historical picture. I want to focus just a little bit on, well, two things, really. The fact that all four of your grandparents had a pretty traumatic journey going across to Pakistan. They had real close shaves. And I want you to tell that story, if you will. But before you do, it is quite clear that in the book you try and take a very even hand, as we would expect of you entirely.
- [42:19]
Michelle Hussain
Yeah. This book had to go through a.
- [42:20]
Connor Boyle
BBC editorial policy when it comes to Mountbatten. But it's also very clear that when you come across the letters of a woman called Barbara Swinburne, who is the wife of a military person in Delhi at the time, and she writes these letters to her mother. And in those letters she makes it quite clear that there is real bias on the part of Mountbatten towards Nehru and that he basically allows Nehru to behave the way that he wants to and has a very clear bias against Jinnah. And I think there will be lots of people who don't know the history of, say, 1946 to 1947, when partition happened, that Jinnah was at one point perfectly prepared to consider a united India. That this idea that Jinnah was this person who was fighting only for an Islamic nation state that was going to be separate from India. And I wonder if you'll just talk a little bit about that because I think that will surprise and interest people who don't know the story in any detail.
- [43:24]
Michelle Hussain
And this was one of the most complex things for me to get my head around because both in 1942 and then again in 1946, there were two significant British efforts to try and find a blueprint for future government which would allow the handover of, allow the transfer of power from Britain to Indian leaders. And it was really unclear, essentially, Muslims as being a minority in India, were very, very worried about being, in a sense, about being overrun about rights and language. And what would a free India look like? What's the safeguards would it have for minority communities? That was how what eventually turned out to be Pakistan, that was how that demand began. It began as a demand about safeguards and rights and eventually grew into the demand for a separate homeland. But yes, as late as 1946, there was a cabinet mission involving Stafford Cripps that came in April May of 1946. And it explicitly advised the British government that there was no question of dividing India. It was not an outcome that could be recommended to the British government. India was too complex, had too complex demographically, religiously, ethnically, for all of these reasons, assets, it was unworkable. And instead it recommended essentially a federation and that some provinces within this federation, the federation would also include princely states and the British ruled provinces. Some of the provinces could group together in their common interests. And so that might mean that Muslim majority provinces, roughly the areas which are now Bangladesh and Pakistan, could group together on particular issues and have an extra voice. And Jinnah, even though there were some within his party, the Muslim League, who were adamant that there should be a separate homeland, he agreed to this federation, this cabinet mission principle, in June 1946. Subsequently, communal tension began in that summer and it developed. And relations between Jinnah, Nehru were not good. Wavell, who was the previous Viceroy, previous Viceroy before Mountbatten, still tried to work really hard to keep, to try and still plug the gaps and keep people together. Jinnah and Nehru, most importantly, at one point he brings them all to London on his plane in December 1946 and sort of takes them to lunch at Buckingham palace and gets them to meet and just hopes that there's a sort of way to smooth over the waters. But the King, but George VI writes in his diary, you know, it just seems impossible. They barely speak to each other and it's all very difficult. But Mountbatten becomes the Viceroy towards the end of March 1947. So it's only a few months until what eventually transpires as independence in the middle of August. So it's an incredibly fraught and frenetic period. And Shahid and Auchinleck are still doing, you know, ordinary military things like the whole of May 1947. They're in the UK because Montgomery is having an important military exercise, a sort of post war military exercise. And so there's all kinds of other things that are part of the post war sort of reorganization and strategy of the army that are happening at the same time. But Jinnah is an important figure in the book because he was for my three Muslim grandparents. I mean, I think it's really important to understand that he's not, he's certainly not a religious leader. There's no sense of that. Jinnah was a very secular, was a very secular minded Muslim. It's like your Muslim identity is, of course, religion is part of it, but it's about, I don't really know how to describe it, but it's about your culture, it's about your language, it's about your sense of identity, it's about your heritage and your background. It certainly doesn't mean that you, you want some kind of, certainly not an Islamic state. That wasn't how Jinnah envisaged it at all. And he's very clear about that in the speeches that he makes as Pakistan is coming into being. In fact, one of the things he says in his key speech as Pakistan is being born in August 1947 is he says to Pakistanis in Karachi, I want you to think about Protestants and Catholics in England and how they used to persecute each other in England. And over time the angularities of these different communities start to disappear. And he says that doesn't mean that you stop being Hindus and Muslims, but that your citizenship essentially becomes more important. So what he's looking, he's thinking back to Tudor times and Mary's reign and Elizabeth's reign. And he's trying to say, look, that has become less important over time in Britain and that is how I think it will happen in Pakistan. And I guess he means in India as well. But he's talking about citizens of different religions being citizens of Pakistan.
- [48:38]
Connor Boyle
Well, we all know how it's all turned out. But let's stick with 1947 for a moment because there was a moment when your grandparents, Mumtaz and Mary were due to leave and they were going to go by train, which is how so many millions of people left India to go to Pakistan and in the other direction too. Just tell us what happened because that was really quite, that was a really dramatic bit in the book.
- [49:09]
Michelle Hussain
And actually they have very similar, they have very similar experiences. Mumtaz and Shahid are both serving men and Mumtaz, after he became a medic, after he qualified as a doctor in 1943, he was very, very short of money, not least because he'd married my grandmother Mary. And he knew that once his parents found out his allowance would probably be cut off and he's in debt and all the rest. And he essentially joins up because there's a very generous stipend for final year medical students because the army desperately needs, the Allies desperately needs doctors for the Second World War. And so he remains in by that stage the RAF as a doctor after the end of the, the war. And so when the summer of 1947 comes, all four of my grandparents and all their children who were born at that point are all living in Delhi. And Mumtaz had opted for Pakistan. They all had to fill in forms and say where they were going. And his Hindu colleagues at air headquarters really tried to tell him to change his mind. Especially they say, you've got a Christian wife, don't take her to Pakistan. The country probably won't last anyway. And so all of this is happening, but in the end it's my grandmother Mary who says, no, you're the only son of your parents. These are parents, by the way, who are not giving her the time of day at this point. But she says, we can't stay in India, we have to go to Pakistan. Your parents will get old and you're the only son and how can you be in a different country? So they opt for Pakistan. And he went to Delhi's station and asked the station master because trains are notorious on either way. Any train going towards Pakistan, it's known it'll be full of Muslims, it could get attacked by Hindus and Sikhs. And exactly the same is happening to Hindus and Sikhs who are traveling east through Punjab. So these trains are really dangerous. But Delhi station master says to them, actually things are much better. Yes, it's fine. And they get booked on the 16th of August on a train. And in the end it's a British officer who happens to be Passing through air headquarters, he says, you know what? The train, I really don't think you should take the four children and your wife on one of these trains. My plane will be going back empty and you can take that plane. So with some others, they do end up getting on this plane and they have this extraordinary journey where the sights below are just awful. He says that the fields are all. This is what Mumtaz writes in his memoir of the of their journey that day. It was a depressing sight. Some sporadic cultivated fields, but mostly burned ones perpetrated by wild mobs on land which was the granary of the subcontinent. There were columns of people, men, women, many with babies in their arms or astride their waists. And young children in obvious disarray, wending their way on foot or in bullock carts with whatever they had rummaged out of their household belongings while escaping from the frenzied marauding hordes. So this is what they can see from the air. And my grandfather Shahid went over also on a military transport at the end of August 1947. But it was my grandmother Taira, who has a very difficult and dangerous journey out of Simla down to Delhi, where Auchinlek looks after her until he's able to get her to Pakistan as well. And I do tell that story in broken threads in some detail. It's a young Hindu officer who's very fond of the whole family who goes up to Simla, and even he is deeply apprehensive because you may have a platoon of infantry, but if there are mobs lining the road. And my grandmother Taira said that it was at that moment when she saw the faces of the men lining the road that she realized that the country was in a state of absolute ferment. Because until that point she had been sort of in a bit of a bubble wherever she was living in Simla and she hadn't realized how bad things were. And Govind Singh, who is the young officer who was in charge of them, my uncle Hassan remembers him saying to him as a six year old, seven year old, if anything happens to the car and anyone asks you who you are, you must say that you are Govind Singh's children. So Govind is imagining the situation where the adults are gone and these children, small children, my mother, her siblings, they had some cousins with them, and these children are left to fend for themselves. And he's wondering, he's basically giving him something that will make him sound like a Hindu or Sikh to anyone who finds these children on their Own. And he also said not that if anyone asks the children's names to use their nicknames. So Hasu instead of Hasan, Guria instead of Shehnaz, it was her nickname meaning doll. And Chutu, the little one for my mother, Shamma. So these are nicknames that are not necessarily Muslim. And hence he's trying to protect them. I'm imagining how could he protect them even if he's not there anymore. So, you know, there are heroes. There are heroes for sure. And to me it was really important that, you know, mine is primarily the story of a Muslim family. But these were. There are mirror image experiences and some of them are in broken threads. But others, when I've spoken about this already, people have shared their own and you know, every community was both victim of violence and target of violence and also perpetrators of violence.
- [54:35]
Connor Boyle
I just want to ask you one question really about your hope for this book. Because you have three sons who were born in this country and, and as were you, even though you've lived all over the world and traveled in your job. I mean, I wonder what you hope for this book for the generation of your children.
- [54:55]
Michelle Hussain
I think I'd really love this to be a record of the fact that there is so little contact today between India and Pakistan. Of course that's not true for those of us who live in, in Britain, because the contact is there for us, although things can sometimes still be fraught. But I want this to be a record of that, where there is contact. All the natural, all the natural things that flow from that, the understanding, the companionship. I mean, my grandparents in the 1965 and then the 1971 war had the experience of knowing that the children of the people they called brother officers, the Hindus and Sikhs they'd served with, their children were fighting in these wars and being taken prisoner in these wars. And they knew some of those people. And in 1971, when one of my uncles was a prisoner of war in India in his prisoner of war camp in Bihar, there was a message saying General Kariyappa would like to know if there's anything he can do. And General Kariyappa was a friend of Shahidan Thayra's and he had somehow found out that Shahidan Taira's son in law was a prisoner of war in this camp. And he sent a message to him saying, is that, you know, to this Major Jaffa, is there anything he can do for you? And so these are, you know, there are such long bonds, but also I feel like my children for them, any history before their grandparents came to this country is like a. Is sort of a blank page and doesn't exist. And I want them to know that their roots are right across South Asia and that there's a. There's a story there that is the tapestry not only of South Asia's communities, but also of Britain's presence in the world. Shahid, my grandfather, I saw in his passport issued in 1932, he was a British subject by birth. He'd never been to Britain until he was. Until he was about 20, and he came here to be a cadet at Sandhurst. But from birth he was a British subject. And so there's that kind of sense of. And you have your own connection to this, to this subject matter.
- [57:01]
Connor Boyle
Yeah, I mean, I. You know, I think it's really interesting when I. When I've applied to go to India, it's always been problematic as, you know, if you have any Pakistani connection and the other way around, too. But I once had a conversation with someone who was considering giving me a visa to go to work in India. And she said. She said, I want to know the name of the. Of your grandparents. And I didn't know the names of my grandparents because I didn't really know my grandparents. And I called my father and I asked him, and he gave me the names. And I told the woman behind the counter, and she said, and where were they born? And I said, well, in India. And she said, well, no, that's not true. And I said, well, it is true, because they were born in the 1920s, so they're Indian. And she said, I'm afraid, my dear, you have what I would call heritage issues. And I thought forever, since I just thought, you know what? That's me and millions of other people. That's how it goes. Anyway, I want to. Before I open the questions up to the floor, I just want to read out this one beautiful passage in the book written by your grandfather, Mumtaz, where he says, our homeland speaks to our most intimate memories, moves our deepest emotions. Everything that is a part of it belongs to us in some measure. And in a way, we belong to it, too, as a leaf belongs to a tree. And when I read that, I was so grateful that you had opened that memoir and that you had taken it seriously in a way that he suspected you never would.
- [58:35]
Michelle Hussain
Yes, I know. I felt really ashamed, actually, as I sat and read this properly. And especially because right at the beginning, he says, I don't think anyone in my family is interested in this, but I'm going to write it down anyway. And he was right. None of us were interested at that time. And so I really am ashamed because, you know, I was. I mean, especially as a journalist, I should have taken an interest much earlier. But I really, you know, sometimes. Sometimes in journalism we talk about, like, we'll do some. I really hate this term, ordinary people. Yeah, I really try and avoid it anyway, because no one is ordinary and everyone's lives are interesting. I really believe that, like, and it just depends what questions you ask and how interested you are and how much work you're prepared to do. And I'm so grateful to Mumtaz for documenting the everyday life and for his observations of just how people lived. How people lived. And because this book is actually also a story of social mobility, it is also the story of people whose within two or three generations, whose circumstances improve considerably because of education and hard work. And I think there is a real Thyra I could see. I was trying to figure out what did Thyra's ancestors. And I realized that her grandfather was a tailor, I think, and believe that he got a contract to supply uniforms to the Raj. Through that, he educated his children. One of his sons became a doctor. And that again then transforms the family into another generation. And so all of that is happening. And I think especially for, you know, Muslims in the north of India, there was, you know, there was a real. By the end of the 19th century, there were sort of twin responses to the entrenched British presence after the Indian Mutiny uprising, first War of independence, whatever you want to call it, the British are there to stay. And some Muslims are really, really struggling with that. And they're much more theological in their approach. And then other Muslims are just thinking, we have to stop thinking of English as the devil's language and the missionary's language. We just need to, you know, learn the language, advance, teach our children this is the future. And so my family are part of that. Second response. And they really are trying to be as outward as they can.
- [61:06]
Connor Boyle
Okay, some questions. I'm going to start with one question that has come in from the audience online. But if we could have the house lights up so we can see the audience.
- [61:16]
Michelle Hussain
There you go. Hello, everyone.
- [61:17]
Connor Boyle
How wonderful. Now we can see you all. Okay, so the first question from the audience online. How do you think the re election of Prime Minister Modi in India will impact the memory of partition in India? I thought I'd give you an easy.
- [61:31]
Michelle Hussain
One to start with. I'm really glad you're in charge of filtering these questions. I'm not sure that this re election does anything different. I think the real problem with the memory of these times is it is just slipping away. That's kind of really why I wanted to write this now is because this is still just about within living memory and that's such a precious resource to document while we still can. But I'm conscious that there are so many families who are untouched by all of this. Right? Especially, you know, I think if you go to, for example, Delhi is full of many families who came from say, Hindu and Sikh families who came from Lahore. Karachi is full of Muslim families who came from Delhi. But actually many Lahores are pretty much born and bred Lahores. That is not, you know, their families didn't cross the border. It's not a part of their heritage. They never, no one in their family was longing or missing or you know, or frankly had left property behind. It was never able to claim their property or was impoverished because of independence. You know, all of these things also, also happened. But so the, the sort of memory and the experience of it is extremely uneven. It regionally obviously also varies a lot and then, and then of course, it's the great passage of time. So, yeah.
- [62:54]
Connor Boyle
Thanks for listening to Intelligence Squared. This episode was produced by myself, Connor Boyle, with production and editing by Mark Roberts and V. Duncan.
- [63:17]
Michelle Hussain
And Doug.
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Michelle Hussain
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Connor Boyle
Uh, limu is that guy with the binoculars watching us.
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Michelle Hussain
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- [64:05]
Michelle Hussain
Talk soon.
- [64:06]
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