The 12 Books of Christmas | Mishal Husain on Family, Empire and Why Partition Still Matters
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Welcome to Intelligence Squared, where great minds meet. I'm Head of Programming Conor Boyle. We're looking back at some of our favourite books of the year in our 12 books of 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 Threads, My Family from Empire to Independence. Let's go to the episode now.

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've never done an event together, I don't think. We haven't. A big interview by Professor Iqbal.

I hadn't quite thought this through fully, Connor, until you introduced her in that way, because I obviously know Razia as my long-time BBC colleague. And you're going to be interviewed, which is not a comfortable place for you, I don't think. Also true. Be gentle with me, everyone. I'm not sure I can ask for that, really.

People always say about very well-known people, oh, they don't need an introduction. But actually, I always think 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 more? Two and a bit, yeah. And presents the Today programme on Radio 4, the 10 o'clock news on BBC One. Many of you will have seen her before.

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 the 26th of 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 it does a thing about big history in

Just the most captivating way. It's the story of her four grandparents, who both empire and...

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.

I don't remember that. I remember feeling it, for sure, but I don't remember saying it. But actually, today I saw that Matthew Dancona did this review, and in it he said, I look forward to the subsequent volumes. And 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 amid all of that, life goes on. You have marriages and children and divorces and every other aspect of the human condition. Well, let's go back.

to the beginning then and tell us the impulse to write it then given that it's been in the making for three years or so. Yes and there's sort of, I

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 Tyra, 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, it was the home of Nehru as Prime Minister of India for many years and is today a museum. So that was Orkinlek'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, Tyra, 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...

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 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. 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. So tell us the story of the wedding gift, which you are, for our pleasure, wearing tonight. 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 interwebs,

I mentioned being given this as a wedding present by my mother's cousin, Sharmina. When she gave it to me, she said, "This shawl, this bit of embroidery is the border of a sari."

And that sari was given to my mother, i.e. 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

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 Jamila's 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.

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 resonant and important. Personally, and actually in 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.

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. Unfinished and unpublished. And unpublished. And Shahid wrote a book that was published. But you also had in your grandmother, Thaira, 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? 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.

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 Jilly Cooper, which, age 13, I thought was the best possible thing about this book and the only really relevant thing to my life.

So you'd read Fear of Flying, but you hadn't quite mastered your grandfather's memoir. 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 some really extraordinary figures. He sits in the room when Gandhji comes to meet Orkinlek and talks to him. And my grandfather is the private secretary, is 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, right. My father, I remember, gave him a PC. This must have been in the late 80s. And he wrote, you know, and the file he...

were 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, that the two, 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 family.

in a very simple mud and 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 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 Parda and what that actually meant, exactly what she wore, what the procedure was when she wanted to leave the house, how she, anytime 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.

I'd only ever sort of dipped into these and then I went back. And my grandmother, Tyra, 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.

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 cover of the book. Yes, and the hardest one was my grandmother Mary, who died when I was 11. And so a lot of what I knew about her, I'd gleaned through the lens of my grandfather, either 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 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 they, 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.

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, you know, I was just conscious. And I did talk a lot to Mary, who has a surviving sibling, my great-aunt Anne, who's 99 years old, God bless her.

Who 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. I mean, it was, it's a beautiful...

captivating love story between Mumtaz and Mary. But as you say, neither side of that, 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. 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

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 whose 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. And when you discovered the tapes that your other grandmother had made, partly she made them because she wanted...

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 centre 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? It felt quite extraordinary. And that, you know, my... Thyra was the...

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 region,

plane 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 record yourself. And...

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 he would have been like, I'm a patriot, this is the country I chose, for better or worse. But presumably also because it would have been difficult for them to have displayed those sentiments. Oh, definitely, 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, you know, obvious sort of next founding father, although Liaquat 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 were we? Well, let me ask you another question about this kind of ringside seat that both Shahid and Tyra had. Because one of the things that is so interesting about Pakistan

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 you're...

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? I certainly, because so much of my work is in political journalism, I certainly could not approach this without thinking about the decision-making of the time, the politics and how those decisions would be made. One of the conclusions I realised 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 Orkinleck, the second most important person, supposedly, in British India. He wasn't privy to many of those. In fact, Mountbatten found him quite irritating. Yes, and they certainly didn't have a good working relationship, and, you know, I think that had very serious consequences. But I think one of the things 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 realises that we have to...

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.

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 Balochistan, these are the true Pakistanis. You know, these are the people of the soil. And that...

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 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 Tahira'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 difficult. And he also went back to India. Well, he didn't really, see, and I think this is still the case, but as a serving army officer, he certainly 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 go to India." And he had died quite young. He died when he was 61. Yes, this is my great-grandfather who died before independence. And so the Indian High Commissioner said, "Look, I can't issue you this visa in Islamabad, but if you're going abroad for any reason,

I could, I could get, 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, 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

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...

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, you know, what was happening was going to be as definitive as it proved to be. This episode is sponsored by NetSuite.

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That loss and the kind of cutting of ties was devastating for so many millions of people. Let's just back up a bit 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.

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. Yes, he saw all the papers. 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? 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 Orkinlak'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 to 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

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 left his papers to the University of Manchester and I went and I sat in the amazing Rylands Library, John Rylands Library in the University of Manchester. Some of you might know it.

And I looked through his archive and he, now obviously this is the tour and 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

you know, 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 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 Orkhanek, 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 ought to be treated the same way that any British soldier or officer who went over to the Nazis is to be treated. And 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 Auchinleck 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 Orkin Lake's decision, and others eventually, as their fate is increasingly politicised 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 Orkin Lake'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 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 extraordinary, it showed extraordinary foresight. It was really a man saying,

ahead of his time, I think, because he said, I...

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

you know, they held him in such high regard. And again, Tahira writes about him when they, she, they both met him in 1946, not long after Shahid's father had died, Orkinlek's marriage had fallen apart. His wife had gone off with a fellow officer. It was a big Delhi scandal in, in about 1945. So, you know, he'd had a hard time. He had no children. And so he,

He and my mother's family really bond. And Thyra wrote, the Ork 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 1941,

which was a, no, 1942, which was a really terrible year. The first half of 1942, East Asia's falling to the Japanese. Rommel is sweeping through North Africa. Auchinleck 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 Auchinleck who had held the Nazis in the Africa Corps.

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 died

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...

You try and take a very even hand, as we would expect of you, entirely. Yeah, this book had to go through a BBC editorial policy, yeah, 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.

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. 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

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 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, 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

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 Jin and Nehru were not good. Wavell, who was the previous viceroy before Mountbatten, still tried to work really hard to try and still plug

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 at, 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.

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 Orkinlek are still doing, you know, ordinary military things. Like the whole of May 1947, they're in the UK because Montgomery is having a...

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-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 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

you know, Mary's reign and Elizabeth's reign. And he's trying to say, look, you know, 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. 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...

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 a really dramatic bit in the book. And actually 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 need doctors for the Second World War.

And so he remains in, by that stage, the RAF as a doctor after the end of 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...

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."

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 System actually thinks they're 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 who says, "You know what, 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 sites below are just awful. He says that the fields are all... This is what Mumtaz writes in his memoir of the 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 waist, and young children in obvious disarray, wending their way on foot or in bullet 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, Tahira, who has a very difficult and dangerous journey out of Simla down to Delhi, where Orkinlek 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, Tyra, 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 he, if anyone asks the children's names, to use their nicknames. So, Hussu instead of Hassan, Guria,

instead of Shehnaz, it was her nickname, meaning doll, and Tutu, the little one, for my mother, Shama. 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...

They're a 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 every community was both victim of violence and target of violence and also perpetrators of violence. 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 as were you.

even though you've lived all over the world and travelled in your job. I wonder what you hope for this book for the generation of your children. I think I'd really love this to be a record of the fact that

You know, there is so little contact today between India and Pakistan. Of course, that's not true for those of us who live 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 things that flow from that, the understanding, the companionship. I mean, my...

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 Cariapa would like to know if there's anything he can do. And General Cariapa was a friend of Shahid and Tyra's, and he had somehow found out that Shahid and Tyra'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 sort of a blank page and doesn't exist. And I want them to know that...

that their roots are right across South Asia and that 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 subject matter. Yeah, absolutely. I think it's really interesting. 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, "I want to know the names of your grandparents."

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. 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

You know, 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. 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...

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 who's within two or three generations whose circumstances improved considerably because of education and hard work. And I think there is a real, Thyra, I could see it. I was trying to figure out what did Thyra's ancestors do? 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 Muslims in the north of India, there was, you know, there were, 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 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.

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. - There you are. - Hello, everyone. 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 one. - Thanks, Razia. 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...

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...

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 Lahoris are pretty much born and bred Lahoris. 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 and was never able to claim their property or was impoverished because of independence. You know, all of these things also happen. But so the sort of memory and the experience of it is extremely uneven. It regionally obviously also varies a lot. And then, of course, it's the great passage of time. So, yeah.

Thanks for listening to Intelligence Squared. This episode was produced by myself, Conor Boyle, with production and editing by Mark Roberts and Bea Duncan.

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