SHADOWS AT NOON THE SOUTH ASIAN TWENTIETH CENTURY
JOYA CHATTERJI
Bodley Head, 849pp, £30
Married to Anil Seal, Chatterji is ‘one half of the power couple that has led the study of South Asian history at Cambridge for fifty years,’ wrote Oxford historian Zareer Masani in the Literary Review, and is therefore ‘well placed’ to meet the challenge of ‘writing a history of South Asia covering a period of a century and addressing everything from politics and the family to food and Bollywood films.’
Masani found Chatterji to be ‘most entertaining in the candid autobiographical vignettes she offers us of life in the upper middle-class Delhi home where she grew up, with a Brahmin Bengali father and an English mother… Although occasionally verbose and repetitive, this is a book which both scholars and the general public can dip into, enjoy and learn from.’
Sunday Times reviewer Dominic Sandbrook found that ‘the shadow of religious and ethnic hatred hangs over much of the book… and yet there is plenty of light amid the darkness.’ For example, Chatterji ‘writes with infectious relish about the baazigars – “magicians, tumblers and acrobats” – who wandered across India in the final decades of the Raj, leaping through rings laced with daggers or lifting heavy weights with their teeth.’
While it is ‘long and dense, and concentrates on Bengal and the Punjab at the expense of the south’ and while the author ‘comes across as being immensely pleased with herself’, nonetheless Sandbrook thought it was refreshing ‘to read a history of modern India, Pakistan and Bangladesh that rises above the usual national and chronological divisions, and that ends on a surprisingly upbeat note.’
Writing in the , William Dalrymple called it ‘wide-angled and hugely ambitious, but also
