Mountbatten, chaos in India, and the tale of Mishal Husain’s family
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A “stained daybreak”: that’s how the Pakistani poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz described the morning on which the British Raj left the Indian subcontinent divided into two nations. In the summer of 1947, an estimated 14 to 18 million Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs left their homes to relocate to a new country whose official faith corresponded with their own. Many lost almost everything; around one million of them were killed. Publicly, Earl Mountbatten – charged with overseeing the dissolution of the Raj – would always claim that he’d handled the situation correctly. But at a private lunch in 1965, he admitted to a BBC news reporter that he had “got things wrong”.
Among the migrants were the grandparents of BBC presenter Mishal Husain, who quotes Faiz at the beginning of Broken Threads, her clear, balanced and moving account of her family’s experience of empire and Partition. She’s not the first in her family to write a book about these traumatic geopolitical events. Her maternal grandfather, Syed Shahid Hamid – who became a two-star general in Pakistan’s army and a close associate of its second president Ayub Khan – wrote an eyewitness account of having been on the staff of the last British commander-in-chief of the Indian Army, Field Marshal Sir Claude Auchinleck. But Husain’s book sets the surprising and complex lives of all four of her grandparents in the context of wider research. (She notes that her grandfather would have envied her easy access to information online.)
Born in England in 1972, the daughter of an NHS surgeon who came here to train, Husain is a considered chronicler of her family history. Never sentimental, but alert to the emotional effects of events, she finds in the early lives of her paternal grandparents a typical stew of faiths and ethnicities. Her father’s father, Mumtaz, was a doctor from a Muslim family of Hindu origins, born in Punjab in the modern territory of Pakistan; her father’s mother, Mary, was the Catholic daughter of an Indian-born Irish doctor. “Knowing the importance of faith in both their lives, I asked [Mumtaz] once how that worked,” Husain writes. “‘We understood each other perfectly,’ he said, looking puzzled. ‘It would have been much more difficult if one of us had no religion.’”
The couple met and fell in love in Lahore: Mumtaz was studying to be a doctor, Mary to be a nurse. They were married in ceremonies at both a church and a mosque, after a brief struggle to find a priest and an imam who would consecrate the bonds of an interfaith couple. The imam noted that Muslims, Christians and Jews were all “people of the book”, in the language of the Qur’an, and that the Prophet himself had a Christian wife.
But in choosing to marry Mary, Mumtaz had to reject the cousin whom his parents wanted him to wed. Husain, with unusual sensitivity, wonders how this felt for the spurned woman, for whom marriage to a doctor would have guaranteed security. The moral of this story – though Husain doesn’t spell it out – is surely that if two faiths could co-exist so fruitfully within one home, why not in the one country?
As medic (Mumtaz) and soldier (Shahid), both of Husain’s grandparents ended up serving under Britons in the Indian Army. Shahid, who came to run hospitals, was distressed by the injuries he treated during the Second World War. In 2020, Husain found records of his military training at Sandhurst: there her grandfather found that, whereas in the days of the East India Company British employees had been expected to learn the languages of Indian people, by the 1930s that respect had slipped. “British officers,” she relays, “were often unable to communicate with their troops and made mistakes that were embarrassing or even insulting. A common one was mispronouncing sowaar, the word for ‘cavalryman’, as sewer, which meant ‘pig’.”
Auchinlek wasn’t one of these officers. He learned Urdu, and visited the homes of his soldiers to eat with them. Mountbatten, by contrast, seemed to Shahid too hasty to do a decent job of winding up the Empire in India. Confused about why a man of such limited diplomatic experience had been given a task of such import, Shahid concluded that “his whole image and career has been built up because he is a member of the Royal family”. Husain’s factual reporting on the appalling Hindu versus Muslim violence that erupted around Partition adds serious weight to her grandfather’s views. She’s shocked to read that, at one point in 1946, negotiations appeared to be leading towards a united India. Mountbatten didn’t manage the situation well.
Looking back from our 21st-century vantage point, Husain suspects that her late grandparents would uniformly be distressed at the subsequent “billions spent on nuclear weapons rather than the poor, the still-open wound of Kashmir, the Pakistan Army’s involvement in politics and the fears of minority communities on both sides of the border”. Broken Threads is a calm and compassionate tale; but it also offers an accessible primer on a little-understood area of recent world history, one that left millions, in Faiz’s words, with no “anchor for the ship of heartache”.
Broken Threads: My Family from Empire to Independence is published by Fourth Estate at £18.99. To order your copy for £16.99, call 0808 196 6974 or visit Telegraph Books
