Hope for one of the most turbulent, traumatised regions in the world

John Keay’s excellent new book on the modern history of South Asia plunges the reader head first into some wildly swirling currents. Here are India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, not to mention Sri Lanka and Nepal, and a supporting cast of mini-states present and past that you may not even have heard of, all tumbling, overlapping, in a state of perpetual contradiction and collision, flowing like a tide of crazed tsunami debris down some great tropical floodplain. This is the world’s biggest population zone, and possibly even the world’s coming economic superpower, in full and violent flow.

Midnight’s Descendants is primarily about the partition of India, the moment in 1947 that initially created independent India and a new state called Pakistan. But Keay’s thesis is that partition did not end there. For the spirit of separation went on to drive the politics of all of the states south of the Himalayas, usually to disastrous effect, such that there is barely a corner of the subcontinent that does not harbour its own set of secessionist conspiracies and terrorisms or its own bloody history of revolt and suppression.

Where did this unresting spirit of communal strife come from? First one must look to history.

In the long view, the territory that is now India, Pakistan and Bangladesh was shaped by Muslim invaders who entered the sub-continent from the direction of Afghanistan and subjugated the mainly Buddhist and Hindu populations for seven centuries. Successive Muslim states brought technology, art and organisation, built fabulous citadels and tombs and mosques, only to collapse into the arms of hard-nosed managers from the world’s first multinational corporation, the East India Company. In short, a history that left an abiding sense of injustice on all sides. Keay’s book is the story of how those trapped grievances were released by partition.