The Book Corner — May 2026
CONTENTS:
THREE ON THE PARTITION OF INDIA
KIRSTEN LAVRANSDATTAR: SIGRID UNDSET’S MEDIEVAL MASTERPIECE
ROAD TO PARTITION:
Three on the Making of India and Pakistan
review BY NATHAN GILMORE
This is, I hope, the first in a continuing series of multi-book reviews called the “Three On” series: three books on a single subject, reviewed in a single post.
I sweated a bit over whether to include Ramachandra Guha’s magisterial “India After Gandhi” in this list, since, in my opinion, it is the most thorough and accurate account of the history of Partition, not to mention the most major account by an Indian historian.
In the end, I left it out, confining myself to three books per post. I do intend to write a review of it by itself at a later date. In my view, Guha’s book merits its own review both by way of its length and its significance. I hope, thus, that my omission here is taken as a compliment, rather than a slight.
***
Freedom At Midnight (1975), Dominique LaPierre and Larry Collins
As close as anything we have got to a classic account, Freedom At Midnight is the work of two journalists, a Frenchman and an American. On a strictly national basis, one would assume a certain level of impartiality. One would be wrong. From the first dozen pages, the overriding effect is one of nostalgia for the good old days of the British Empire, an elegiac ode for the passing of the age.
The prose here is flowery and ornate, a throwback to Robert K. Massie’s grand saga of Russia’s dying dynasty. The advice of Shelby Foote that a historian can’t be false to his facts is taken to the breaking point. Not that Collins and LaPierre could credibly be accused of being false to facts—but they do a great deal of inventing.
The India of Collins and LaPierre is the India of M.M. Kaye, a land of sadhus and serpent-charmers, of boiling masses of men and women crowding the markets; it is the land of the British raj, of lords and ladies taking tea on meticulously manicured lawns where they watch polo matches. And it is the land of great men, intellectuals like Nehru and Jinnah, who loom large over the conflict brewing between the two largest factions of a factious land: Hindus and Muslims.
Gandhi, perhaps, looms the largest. He is the benevolent spirit that animates and energizes and frustrates and catalyzes; his diminutive figure towers over the rest. Here, he is given center stage—fasting, marching to the sea to make a symbolic mound of salt. His health, his philosophies, his sexuality, his personality are all probed over with the care of a museum docent. And he deserves the spotlight, if LaPierre and Collins are to be believed. In point of fact, the narrative could use a more critical angle: many more recent studies have found Gandhi’s methods patronizing and paternalistic; there is a contingent of the lower castes that reject his appellation for them (“harijan”, meaning “beloved of God”) as inviting pity, instead preferring the more political Dalit (“oppressed”). The tone of the book is like that of Richard Attenborough’s 1982 epic—reverent but honest, acutely aware of the historical significance of its subject.
There are no real villains. If Gandhi is the saint, the hero of the story, his opponents are merely that—opponents. Mohammed Ali Jinnah, obstinate in his dream of a separate, independent nation of Muslims and for Muslims, comes across as much the same figure I saw all my childhood staring out from a rupee note: somber, earnest, serious and a bit of a stick in the mud. This is not his story, but Jinnah, especially, is a fascinating figure. The Quaid-i-Azam emerges as a wickedly intelligent man, pragmatic yet belligerent, chain-smoking his way through yet another committee meeting. Not as charismatic as Gandhi, without his all-consuming spiritual fervor, but with perhaps a greater talent for practical politics, Jinnah was one of those men whose personal contradictions seem to infuse the country that they father with their own character: committed Muslim with a secular ethos, a practical fanatic whose ultimatum was “India divided or India destroyed”. A man whose default solution for every problem facing the splintering country was “Pakistan!”, Jinnah made the creation of a separate Islamic state all but inevitable. Whether Jinnah, a man of rational secularism and liberal democracy would recognize, let alone champion, the Islamic theocracy that Pakistan has become is both doubtful and outside the purview of this slightly dated history.
What of those who had so lately had India wrested from their grasp? How does a benevolent dictatorship release the reins of power? The tone of Freedom At Midnight is unfairly and unstintingly elegiac. Lord Mountbatten, the last viceroy of India, is painted primarily as a tragic figure whose loss of India is to be pitied (the direct interviews the authors conducted with him may account for this slant). The purplest passages of prose are reserved for the British aristocracy, the bastions of civilization who are ultimately powerless in the face of their subjects’ barbarism.
If a defense is to be mounted for Freedom At Midnight’s contradictions, it may be based on the assertion that India is itself a country of contradictions, too complex and complicated to make swift and simple self-rule possible. But history suggests that assertion is wrong. Collins and LaPierre are fortunate to have lived the history they relate, and to have been proved wrong by it.
***
The Great Partition: the Making of India and Pakistan (2007), Yasmin Khan
A voice from inside the house. Yasmin Khan is a British historian of Irish-Pakistani descent, and her account has a distinct personal approach, though, ironically, she turns out to be far more inclusive and thorough than Collins and LaPierre.
She argues that Partition was never inevitable, never the result of a concerted national effort, but rather the more nebulous outcome of a long internecine conflict between two, almost ad hoc nations-in-the-making. Mohammed Ali Jinnah had originally insisted on a federal solution in which Muslims would have veto power over the Indian/Hindu majority—only eventually did he settle on the idea of a separate Muslim nation-state.
Khan’s book includes the most detailed account I have yet read of the role and fate of the Sikhs during Partition, sympathetically and earnestly relating how these proud and independent people were literally caught in the crossfire. A contingent of Sikhs had enthusiastically supported Partition in hopes that a separate Sikh homeland—Sikhistan—might be established alongside Pakistan, but this dream was utterly crushed by hypernationalist sentiment in the new Pakistani government. Jinnah had hoped that the Sikhs would support his dream of Pakistan, and put Sikh autonomy on the table as a quid pro quo; the Sikh community refused to negotiate and used violence to move towards an independent Sikh state. It’s a fascinating and tragic story, worth a specialized study of its own.
Khan uncovers an important, if deeply disturbing, fact: that the Indian nationalist movement included, from at least the 1930s, fascist leanings. Codified in the Hindutva movement, differentiated from classical fascism by its emphasis on religious rather than national identity and brought to its modern incarnation in the Bharatya Janata Party, the movement sought to return India to the greatness of her classical age and oust the pernicious influences of British-influenced democracy. Again, absent from both the other books reviewed here, this facet of the narrative is well worth a specialized study.
Though scholarly in tone, Khan’s book cannot help but focus on the personal side—and is all the stronger for it. Asian politics has perhaps tended more toward the personal than is common in the West; higher value is placed on social harmony, personality and community conformity. The personal is political here, maybe more than anywhere else in the world.
Khan captures this with heart-stirring vividness: she tells the story of a youth who walked up to Nehru and slapped him, crying “Bring my mother and my sisters back to me!” The most uneducated villager felt the effects of the political upheaval as much, or more, than any harrumphing statesman. One wonders where these stories might figure into Collins and LaPierre’s gilded visions of a heroically dying empire.
Khan’s is the least colorful and poetic of the three books reviewed here, but that’s hardly a criticism—one almost feels ashamed at expecting any rhetorical flourishes or engaging characters when the meat of the matter is so tragic. For Khan, it’s not a grand adventure, it’s personal.
***
Indian Summer: The Secret History of the End of an Empire (2007), Alex Von Tunzelmann
Anyone made leery of Alex Von Tunzelmann’s credentials as historian by Andrew Roberts’ scathing review of the film she wrote about Winston Churchill, or the numerous tepid reviews she received for this book may be beguiled by her talents as a prose stylist. Reading, at times, like a modernized Collins and LaPierre, Von Tunzelmann’s gossipy, chatty prose seems to erroneously doubt the importance of the larger story.
Hers, to its credit, is one of the few accounts to look critically at Gandhi’s absolutist approach to non-violence—Gandhi is quoted as telling the Jewish people to adopt non-violence as the only moral response to the Nazi onslaught. Von Tunzelmann makes sure to include Churchill’s snide remarks about Gandhi—“his fasting antics”—and the general tone is of bemused dismissiveness. Stripped of his mystique, Gandhi appears here as an obstinate fanatic, uncompromising and obdurate, which carries a grain of truth, but is hardly the whole story.
Jinnah, however, manages to come off more favorably. Again we see that agile pragmatism, that uncanny ability to make strategic concessions in order to achieve immutable objectives—a political grandmaster sacrificing pawns to capture his kings. Sleekly, almost strategically secular, his vision of a modern, liberal Pakistan at every point contested by the varied voices calling for a united India—Jawaharlal Nehru on political grounds and Gandhi on spiritual principle. One might wish for a more radical approach, but, like Lincoln, Jinnah is one of those politicians with a generational talent for an impossibly nimble practicality—flawed, deeply imperfect, but the best man for the job that fate could possibly have given us.
Von Tunzelmann’s prose is limber, but veers into an affected folksiness at times and stilted metaphors at others (a humorous warning not to confuse a female pseudonym with Mr Toad’s washerwoman disguise in “The Wind in the Willows” falls flat and distracts from the gravity of the story). This is probably due to her doubt that the story carries enough weight of its own—but it most certainly does. The dull stuff of committee meetings is often the actual stuff of history, regardless of a reader’s likeliness of being entertained by it—and historical accuracy shouldn’t be sacrificed on the altar of gossipy readability.
For all that, this is popular history, mostly well-told, when Von Tunzelmann isn’t trying too hard. Hers is more the story of people caught in the sweep of grander events, and I would start with both of the above studies for a broader overview.
KRISTEN LAVRANSDATTAR:
Sigrid Undset’s Medieval Masterpiece
review by BY NATHAN GILMORE
Kristin Lavransdatter by Sigrid Undset, trans. Tiina Nunnally. Penguin Classics, 2005.
I first came across “Kristin Lavransdatter” browsing through Penguin’s website— they’re justifiably proud of their new translation by the novelist and earlier translator of Hans Christian Andersen, Tiina Nunally.
“Kristin Lavransdatter” is the story of its titular heroine, a young girl when we meet her, living in 14th-century Norway. She is a willful young child, often at odds with her deeply devout parents, and when an attempted rape raises suspicions about her character, she is sent to live in the Nonneseter Abbey.
Much of the significance of “Kristin Lavransdatter” is based on its historical and ethnological accuracy. The life and culture of a small medieval monastery come to life as we see Kristin struggle with her own selfish desires, mostly centered around a devastatingly handsome young man named Erlend. This is a problem on several levels, firstly because Kristin is already betrothed to a neighboring landowner’s son, and second because Erlend is living with an illicit lover.
The trilogy is such an odd, and oddly appealing, mixture of piety and earthiness. The natural world, described in passages of finely-wrought prose as beautiful as anything in Tolkien, keeps encroaching on the spiritual realm, described as fervently as anything in the writings of Teresa of Avila. This is after all, the medieval ages of Scandinavia, a social and cultural and spiritual midpoint between the old paganism of the Norse cultures and the civilizing yet stern influence of the Catholic Church. There is something of Arthurian legend in Kristin and Erlend’s romance, as well as something of Sir Walter Scott’s idealized historical romances, but the high-flown moralizing of those sagas gains a sharper edge of sensuality and humanness in “Kristin Lavransdatter”. These are no idealized archetypes. In her youth, Kristin is both headstrong and indecisive, a passionate person who can’t quite decide what to do about her passions. In her young womanhood, she is impetuous, a bit naive, and above all, a slave to her passions. Her father dotes on her, and she loves him in return, but not even filial affection can bend her will. The man her father chooses for her husband is socially and financially the perfect choice— but Kristin feels nothing for him.
As seems to have been common in those days, Kristin goes for a stint at a monastery to clear her head and make up her mind. Enter Erlend, a brave and ravishingly handsome rake, who despite being married already, romances and seduces Kristin.
There is a lot of sex in “Kristin Lavransdatter”, but it serves as a plot point, rather than titillation and is only vaguely referenced. Kristin is a beautiful woman, and most men in her orbit (apart from her sons) are willing to be manipulated and controlled by her. Kristin’s father is not particularly happy about the affair, but is unable to oppose his headstrong and defiant daughter. Kristin weds Erlend, and covers up her affair by wearing the wreath traditionally reserved for virgin brides.
These fallen characters are what makes “Kristin Lavransdatter” special. Kirstin is the heroine, and we never truly despise her, but she is not above deceit and manipulation in getting what she wants. Erlend loves her, but is impetuous, impulsive and wasteful.
As the second book opens and the years pass, Kristin and Erlend have seven sons, and the meat of the second and third books deals with the sometimes stormy relationship between Kristin and the men in her life— the sons evince their father’s willfulness and rashness, enabled partly by Erlend’s permissiveness. Erlend, meanwhile, becomes involved in a plot to depose the king and in another affair, which ultimately leads to his being found out. There is no hint of moralizing, but there is the suggestion of a grand machinery of justice— sin will out.
“Kristin Lavransdatter” is quite Dostoevskian in this aspect— the transgression of the moral order inevitably leads to disaster, whether by chance or by human agency— but there is a subtlety that is not found in Raskolnikov’s tribulations. Erlend’s plot is discovered, and his sons are disinherited; the family is shunned by the community. What Undset does not do is lay the blame on Kristin for her personality. The issue is not Kristin’s willfulness or her desires; it is the imperfection of human nature at large, and it is Kristin’s unwillingness to forgive her husband that leads to the action of the final act.
Kristin gives birth to her final son, and in a terrible breach of local custom, names the child after her estranged husband. The manner of the times forbids naming a child after a living relative, and so Kristin is saying that Erlend is effectively dead to her. Soon after, Erlend is killed, but dies with an assertion of Kristin’s innocence on his lips.
Kristin joins the monastery at Trondheim, and lives a pious life until her death of the Black Plague.
Sigrid Undset herself converted to Catholicism shortly after the publication of “Kristin Lavransdatter” and the book bears all the marks of a soul in transition. She would, like her heroine, enter the church as a lay Dominican— a highly controversial move in her deeply Protestant Norway. One senses she would have steeled herself and gone her own way in much the manner of her resolute, sensitive and introspective Kristin. She won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1928, chiefly on the basis of “Kristin Lavransdatter”, and battled censorship and harassment by the Nazi regime.
Sigrid Undset suffered a nervous breakdown in 1948 and died the following year at the age of 67.
Her other major work is a tetralogy, “The Master of Hestviken”. She made her reputation on “Kristin Lavransdatter”, however, and the sad, winding and emotive story of a headstrong young woman rises out of the obscurity of medieval Norway with a strange and bitter beauty.
