Most readers of Inside Story will know someone who is tracing their family’s history. User-friendly databases of newspapers and censuses, canny businesses like ancestry.com, commercialised DNA analysis and television programs like Who Do You Think You Are? make searching for forebears a delightful divertissement for laptop and keyboard.
Some people write up their results for the benefit of offspring and family members. Others bring them out as privately produced books. But when a well-known journalist and writer pieces together remarkable detective work to tell the tale of four grandparents who were born into the tempests of 1920s India, major publishers see a hot property.
Mishal Husain’s Broken Threads: My Family from Empire to Independence is such a book. Born in the English midlands town of Northampton, Husain has been a leading British journalist, documentary-maker and BBC presenter for years. HarperCollins and its subsidiary 4th Estate no doubt saw a successful book in her account of her four remarkable grandparents.
Broken Threads combines Husain’s skills of storytelling with a persistent curiosity, an A-list of contacts and three grandparents who left accounts of the lives that illustrate the “broken threads” of the title.
On her father’s side, her grandmother was an Anglo-Indian Catholic from south India who married a medical student from Multan in today’s Pakistan, and lived there for the rest of her life. Multan today is a major Pakistani city, one of the hottest places in the world (51C one day in 2010). In the old days, Multan was a provincial town where her grandfather Mumtaz “would have spent his entire life” if his devout Sunni Muslim family had had its wishes.
But Mumtaz was a thread-breaker. His childhood fascination with medicine and illness — perhaps inspired by hearing screams of an aunt giving birth in an airless corner of the family home during a Multan summer — led the family to encourage him to become a doctor. He was accepted into the medical college at Lahore, the capital of Punjab. He was the only son, and Lahore was 350 kilometres from Multan.
Sending an offspring to college has consequences. In July 1940 Mumtaz met Mary Quinn, a convent-educated Anglo-Indian nursing student, who became, he later wrote, “the anchor and focus of my life.” They married stealthily two years later, having found a Catholic priest and a Muslim imam, each prepared to perform a separate marriage ceremony according to his own rites. (The imam was from the Australia Mosque in Lahore, founded by a camel driver and pedlar who had made his fortune in Perth.)
Back in Multan the Muslim family was appalled. They acknowledged Mary’s existence only years later, after five grandsons had been born. In Mary’s home in south India the nuns were not much impressed either. But Mary remained a Catholic and her husband, Mumtaz, a Muslim. Mishal Husain’s father was the first-born in 1943.
As a young, newly married doctor needing an income, Mumtaz joined the British Indian army fighting the Japanese. He and Mary were posted all over India, but when partition of “British India” into India and Pakistan came in 1947, the choice was simple. His parents and ancestors were from Multan, and Multan was deep inside the land that became Pakistan. When it was pointed out to Mary that she would have to live in a Muslim country among hostile in-laws, she said (according to Mumtaz’s unpublished memoir), “I will naturally follow what Mumtaz does and I am not concerned by anything else, as long as we are together.”
On the other side of her family, Husain’s maternal grandparents came from the sophisticated old Muslim elite of north India, centred around Lucknow, Delhi and Aligarh, deep in what became independent India. Her grandfather Shahid, who became major-general Syed Shahid Husain of the Pakistan army, was close to the centre of power in the two years leading up to partition.
Until the 1890s, many families, whose ancestors had once been privileged rulers, rejected foreign ideas and the education systems of British colonial rule. “No one was studying, no one was learning English, or going to school,” her grandmother Tahirah said in a tape recording. “They were pining for the old society and old times — Persian, Urdu, the Mughals.” Aligarh, however, was a centre of reform, and she was encouraged to do a medical degree (uncompleted) like her father.
She met Shahid at a dinner in Delhi in February 1940 choreographed by friends and relatives. They agreed to marry that night and because of the war, ceremonies were speedily arranged in May while he was recovering from a wound sustained in the Japanese bombing of Mandalay.
When the war ended and British India stumbled towards the thread-snapping of 1947, both the men, Shahid the soldier and Mumtaz the doctor, found themselves and their immediate families in Delhi.
Shahid observed those last months at the highest levels. He had been singled out to be private secretary to Claude Auchinleck, the last commander-in-chief of the united Indian army. Shahid later wrote a book about it, Disastrous Twilight (1986), which both helps and constrains Husain. When your grandfather has said what he wanted to say, the space for speculation is narrower.
Broken Threads and the proximity of Shahid to great events shed a different light on two key figures of the time — Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the father of Pakistan, and Auchinleck, the army chief. Auchinleck is sometimes presented as the general Churchill sacked in North Africa and replaced with Bernard Montgomery, the flamboyant “Monty” who commanded British forces at D-Day. Monty, a popular version has it, won the victory at El Alamein in October 1942.
Husain, however, tells the story her family told. It was Auchinleck who stopped Rommel and the Afrika Korps and trained the desperately needed reinforcements that flowed once the Americans were in the war. Auchinleck built the El Alamein victory.
Auchinleck was an Indian army man, raised in India, fluent in Urdu. Lonely, divorced, childless, he appeared devoted to his profession. “The Auk became a father figure in our lives,” Husain’s grandmother Tahirah recorded. For her two eldest boys, age four and five, he was simply “Chiefi,” who would send an aide to collect them to play in his garden while he pottered among his plants during Delhi’s brief sunsets.
Muhammad Ali Jinnah has similarly been presented as an icily remote, English-styled lawyer who put on a Muslim veneer near the end of his life as a way of achieving fame and power. That’s not, of course, how he is depicted in Pakistan, where he is the “great leader” — the Quaid-e-Azam — with a magnificent mausoleum in Karachi.
Shahid, the maternal grandfather, who was a cadet at Sandhurst, met Jinnah in a restaurant in London in 1932. “A rather well-dressed man came in,” Shahid wrote. “We… said amongst ourselves that he did not appear to be an Englishman.” Jinnah noticed the group of young men and introduced himself; they knew him by name, but had never seen a photo.
“By 1947,” Husain writes, “Jinnah… was the man my three Muslim grandparents trusted to safeguard their interests.” He had the calm of a successful barrister and a resolve that turned listeners into followers. Shahid’s sister had been a communist in the 1930s, but after quizzing Jinnah at meeting set up through Shahid’s influence she went up to Jinnah, “kissed his hand and said she had been converted.”
Husain’s three Muslim grandparents all died in Pakistan. Mary, the Catholic, lived her married life in Pakistan but died in Britain on a visit for cancer treatment in 1984.
For practised writers like Mishal Husain whose forebears were swept up in great events, the motivations for writing a family history are twofold. There’s the reason that drives most family historians: an irresistible itch to thoroughly understand stories that have been spoken, and sometimes whispered, by family members “for as long as I can remember,” plus the desire to pass on a record of the family to offspring.
As a professional writer, Husain has a second motive: her family story, told by an expert researcher like herself, makes Broken Threads a fine book and both a reader’s — and a publisher’s — delight.
In Australia, the fascination with family history often stems from a sense, picked up from whispers heard in childhood, of a convict or indigenous ancestor going back to the 1850s. Today, such connections are usually matters of pride and amusement. The fruits of such explorations, via the National Library’s Trove, state archives and sites such as ancestry.com, may result in a few pages of typescript and a genealogical chart. More ambitious attempts may get neatly formatted with photographs and shared with family members as printouts or digital files.
At the top end of such efforts are full-scale books. In the case of Mary Varghese’s Funga Safari: My Family’s Journey from India to East Africa and Australia (2024), the outcome is a handsomely designed and illustrated production that compares favourably with the get-up of Broken Threads. Printed in Canberra, the finished product benefited from the author and her husband Stephen Foster both being battle-hardened scholars and editors.
Family histories have to consider family members. Who will be offended, annoyed or embarrassed? Who might sue? Though Husain’s maternal grandfather, the general, disapproved of Ayub Khan’s first military coup in 1958, he served in the army till 1964 and joined the government of another military dictator Zia ul-Haq for three years from 1978.
Husain does not, however, sugar-coat the life that Mary, the Catholic, had in Pakistan after independence. “It was not a smooth marriage,” Mary’s sister told her. Mumtaz’s elders still hoped that an unfulfilled family promise of an arranged marriage with a cousin would still happen, long after Mary’s years in Pakistan had begun.
The gold standard for family histories in India and Pakistan was set years ago by Prakash Tandon’s detailed, nimble and witty Punjabi Century, 1857–1947 (1961). Sweeping in time, Tandon’s book spans four generations from a great grand-uncle who fought in a Sikh army against the British in 1849 to Tandon himself, the first Indian managing director of Hindustan Lever.
Punjabi Century’s attraction lies in Tandon’s talent for recalling how people spoke, how ceremonies happened and how new objects affected households. His father’s acquisition of a Singer sewing machine led to all offspring being given singing lessons. “He was convinced in his humourless way that the Singer people were using to good advantage the international love of singing.”
Tandon, however, had an advantage over Husain. He had few records or memoirs to constrain him. He could talk to old people, but he was free to use his memories and assemble his story as a novelist might.
That’s another way to tell a family story — as a novel. An author can plead that a novel is “only a story.” Attia Husain’s Sunlight on a Broken Column (1961), a wistful autobiographical novel about the helplessness of Muslim women in the old families at the time of partition, enabled her to tell her story with a candour and poignance that a “factual” account would not allow.
I know a brilliant young historian who wants to write his next book about his family, set in India in the turbulent last hundred years. Family members may, however, have broken old (and new) social norms in ways that engender shame and anger.
For him and other historians, it’s the process by which the rules are broken that is irresistible because it reveals the manners and pressures of the past. But how much can someone afford to cross the line and wound or antagonize relatives and friends about matters they would like to forget? Now, my friend says, perhaps the only way to write a “true” family history is to write a novel. •
Broken Threads: My Family from Empire to Independence
By Mishal Husain | 4th Estate | $39.99 | 299 pages
