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Irish Times
8 hours ago
- Politics
- Irish Times
Shattered Lands. Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia: Wonderful telling of a sad history
Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia Author : Sam Dalrymple ISBN-13 : 978-0008466817 Publisher : William Collins Guideline Price : £25 The very title of Sam Dalrymple's magnificent book underlines how vital a portrayal of the Indian subcontinent in the 20th century it provides. Many people will probably do a double take when seeing 'partition' in the plural in the subtitle, even more so as it refers to five of them. For most of us, the partition of India no doubt refers to the 1947 division of British-controlled India into the modern Republic of India and the Islamic Republic of Pakistan . But there are other divisions that have cross-hatched what was once the world's largest imperial holding – the division, and perpetual provisional status, of Jammu and Kashmir between the two newly independent countries; the 1971 secession of East Pakistan to become Bangladesh; and also the separation of two other places whose history as part of the Indian Empire is mostly forgotten: Britain's Arabian territories, including Qatar, Bahrain, Dubai, Oman and Aden, which split on Britain's orders in 1931, and Burma, which became a separate crown colony six years later. Dalrymple's richly documented history provides an excellent refresher course for anybody in need of one. The better-known partition naturally looms largest in the book, one of the most dismaying humanitarian catastrophes of a bleak century, spurred by the rise of ethnonationalism, the gross incompetence and racist indifference of the colonial administration and crucially, the proximity to a global conflict that created a heavily militarised society, particularly in the Punjab, the historic home of the British Indian Army. Beginning with the Calcutta Riots of August 16th, 1946, the day the All-India Muslim League called a general strike to demand a separate Muslim homeland, India's Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs slaughtered each other in what Dalrymple calls a 'mutual genocide'. The bloodshed resulted in the deaths of up to two million people and the displacement of between 12 and 20 million, culminating in 'population transfers' between India and Pakistan that are considered the biggest movement of humans in history. READ MORE Panicked populations, driven by fear, distrust and rampant misinformation, killed their neighbours and fellow citizens, often in out-of-body frenzies of violence that would, in some accounts Dalrymple cites, shock and traumatise even the perpetrators for the rest of their lives. 'Firing a village is a normal occurrence like having breakfast, murder is like having a cigarette,' one contemporary account put it. There were many instances of Hindus and Sikhs protecting Muslim friends and strangers, and vice versa, but even these kindly acts would ultimately be powerless against the massive force of genocidal violence, leading people on both sides of the divide to migrate. These included the Hindu Urdu poet and satirist Fikr Taunsvi, who reluctantly left his beloved native Lahore for Delhi after his daughter was murdered by a neighbour. The uprooting of populations also diminished cultures, with the Delhi novelist Ahmed Ali lamenting the 'shrinking of his city's language' after partition. It was only the assassination of Gandhi by the Hindu nationalist Nathuram Godse in November 1949 that, Dalrymple says, 'shocked the two nations to their senses' and brought an end to the violence. But the book deals with a lot more than just the events of 1947–1949. Dalrymple begins his account with the bumptious visit of the Simon Commission to India in 1928. The commission was tasked with writing a constitution for British India and was led by Lord John Simon, selected because he had a 'virgin mind on Indian affairs'. It was a perfect exemplification of Britain's mishandling of India and the commission members were shocked to find they were not overly welcome in the colony, where anti-colonial sentiment was rife. One of those members was a young Clement Attlee, who would, two decades later as prime minister, preside over India's leaving the empire. The first cleavage, and the first signs of ethnic strife, occurred in Burma, where there were two big pogroms of Indians in the 1930s. Though it might seem strange to think of present-day Myanmar as being part of India, there was, even among progressive Burmese, support for remaining attached to it. [ Understanding the hidden history of Myanmar Opens in new window ] Burma would later become a front line of the second World War, occupied by the Japanese, with local nationalists, including Aung San, father of Nobel peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi , collaborating with the occupiers in the hope of getting independence. The former congress leader Subhas Chandra Bose would do the same, establishing the Indian national army, which fought the Allies alongside the Japanese. The British looked warily on the indifference to the war effort of other Indian nationalists, imprisoning most of them, including Jawaharlal Nehru, for much of the war. Only the Muslim League leader, and later founder of Pakistan, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, stayed out of prison on account of his support for the Allies. Still, the British knew independence would be inevitable when the war ended, as was acknowledged by the wartime viceroy Archibald Wavell. The Bengal famine, caused by a rise in the price of rice after Burmese imports disappeared, and exacerbated by Churchill 's callous racism, brought the impending break-up only closer. [ Winston Churchill sent the Black and Tans to Palestine Opens in new window ] Few of the chief architects of partition emerge with much credit. Nehru and Jinnah are portrayed as self-serving opportunists detached from the reality of life for ordinary Indians. Wavell's successor, Mountbatten, was, even among his contemporaries in India, widely viewed as incompetent although he was inexplicably left in charge of the process of handing over the colony, which was planned with an insanely irresponsible deadline of just 77 days. Even Gandhi, though not particularly venal in Dalrymple's nuanced telling, is far from the facile totem of saintliness he is viewed as in the West. [ Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire Opens in new window ] Still, Dalrymple gives them their due, acknowledging that partition was viewed at the time as a way to put an end to the ethnic violence already under way, even though it only ended up exacerbating it. He quotes John Keenan, an Anglo-Indian army officer of Irish descent, who surmises that the rush to get partition completed was due to fears on Nehru's part that the Tories would return to power in the UK and that Churchill would put a stop to decolonisation. India might even have been partitioned further: 584 princely states existed in India before 1947, with no constitutional link to the British empire. The best-known of these were Jammu and Kashmir, Hyderabad and Travancore, the latter of which made an ill-fated attempt at declaring independence in 1947. Almost all the princely states were subsumed into either India or Pakistan, with rare peripheral exceptions, such as Nepal and Bhutan, living on as independent states. There were also losers in the shake-up who failed to see their aspirations to independent homelands realised, such as the Naga and the Mizo, two Tibeto-Burman ethnic groups who live either side of the India-Myanmar border. Pakistan also continues to face insurgencies from separatists in its southwestern Balochistan province. The final partition occurred in 1971 when East Pakistan – following horrendous massacres by Pakistani forces that were an echo of the violence of the late 1940s, and a subsequent war with India – gained its independence as Bangladesh. In retrospect, it seems inevitable that a non-contiguous state, its two entities 2,000km apart and speaking different languages, would struggle to last. The fact the Karachi government refused to make Bengali an official language, despite it being spoken by 55 per cent of the population, made things only more fractious. Even so, the violence when it came was no less shocking than 24 years previously. Though relinquishing the colonies was undoubtedly the right thing to do, the precipitous manner in which it was done was much to Britain's discredit, and was done as much out of economic expediency as anything else. With Britain financially crippled after the war, Attlee was determined to let go of India. Britain would similarly give up its Arabian holdings in 1971 when inflation at home made running them far too costly. Oil money meant decolonisation was relatively smooth in Bahrain, Qatar, Oman and the Trucial States (now the UAE) but Aden, which was plunged into civil war, fared less well. Though nationalists across the various countries will surely disagree, Dalrymple is in no doubt the partitions left all countries, on the subcontinent at least, worse off. Travel between the three countries, two of which are belligerent nuclear powers, is now heavily restricted and he notes that it is easier for Indians, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis to meet in England, their former colonial power, than to meet in the subcontinent itself. The economies of all three countries suffered, particularly Pakistan and Bangladesh, which inherited little of the pre-partition structures or personnel of governance. The scope and verve of Shattered Lands makes it a wonderful read. Dalrymple, who grew up in Delhi, draws on a range of superb memoirs and testimonies of partition, including from the poet Taunsvi, the brigadier Keenan, and the Harvard graduate-turned-Bangladeshi freedom fighter Salahdin Imam, and also an impressive amount of documentation. He tells an extremely sad tale very well. Further reading From the Ruins of Empire by Pankaj Mishra (Penguin, 2013) Mishra's history of the responses of Asian intellectuals, from India, China and the Arab world, to colonialism is a landmark work that provides invaluable insight into the underpinnings of anti-colonial action, which have been often obscured in western narratives. The Siege of Krishnapur by JG Farrell (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1973) Farrell wrote of nothing but empire in his short but glorious career, which encompassed three novels. The Siege of Krishnapur brilliantly details the siege of a fictional British garrison town in India during the 1857 Mutiny. Winner of the Booker Prize in 1973, it lost out in the 2008 Best of the Booker, perhaps in an act of postcolonial poetic justice, to Midnight's Children. [ JG Farrell: plagued by disease Opens in new window ] Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found by Suketu Mehta (Review, 2005) The Indian-American Suketu Mehta was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for this ambitiously sprawling nonfiction book about Mumbai, the city he lived in as a child before emigrating to the US. An important addition to city literature.
Irish Times
10-05-2025
- Business
- Irish Times
Paschal Donohoe on How Feminist Economics Can Change Our World; Making Sense of Chaos; and Why We're Getting Poorer
Deficit: How Feminist Economics Can Change Our World Author : Emma Holten, tr. Sherilyn Nicolette Hellberg ISBN-13 : 978-0753561461 Publisher : WH Allen Guideline Price : £18.99 Making Sense of Chaos: A Better Economics for a Better World Author : J Doyne Farmer ISBN-13 : 978-0141981208 Publisher : Penguin Guideline Price : £10.99 Why We're Getting Poorer: A Realist's Guide to the Economy and How We Can Fix It Author : Cahal Moran ISBN-13 : 978-0008637958 Publisher : William Collins Guideline Price : £22 When US president Donald Trump announced a pause in his tariff plan, he said 'people were jumping a little bit out of line – they were getting yippy' . This 'yippy' behaviour referred to the volatility in the markets for US government debt. This is a reminder of the famous observation of James Carville, the great campaign strategist of president Bill Clinton. He said that if he was reincarnated, he 'would like to come back as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody'. These books examine this power; the influence that economics have on our societies. They seek to further understand the behaviour of economies and how it can be altered for the benefit of citizens. Cahal Moran writes, 'The emergence of capitalism and the market economy is a historically unique and curious phenomenon, and managing it is not at all easy.' With this, his work, Why We're Getting Poorer, begins to describe the many economic challenges confronted by citizens. READ MORE They include the costs of inflation, the lack of affordable homes and the consequences of extreme inequality. To his credit, the author does not just diagnose difficulties, he proposes solutions. He aims to be, as the subtitle notes, a 'realist'. His proposals mostly advocate a stronger and bigger State and a scepticism of the claims of free markets. An important quality of this book is that Moran does not suggest that his solutions are perfect or lacking in trade-offs. He warns that 'notions of abolishing the system make good rallying calls, but they need to be translated into concrete proposals for a better future'. In an era of certain and loud claims, this is welcome. The accessible tone of this work will allow any reader to evaluate both his analysis of the problems and his solutions. An important theme is to refute the suggestion that the economy is autonomous, that it is independent of choices made by societies. The first and last chapters passionately, and correctly, make this argument. [ Becoming Irish American: The Making and Remaking of a People from Roanoke to JFK Opens in new window ] Moran reminds the reader that 'most settled civilisations did not believe there was a separate economic sphere'. He calls for a revival of a 'demos' that is more considerate of how economies are shaped by political decisions. This approach is then used to examine a variety of challenges. The chapter on housing considers very familiar problems and relates them to underlying issues of the value of land and its use in the construction of homes. Moran argues for rent controls but acknowledges the debate regarding the impact of this policy on the supply of rental accommodation. The strongest section of this book is an evaluation of the origins of money and the role of central banks in our economies. This is explained through a simple book-keeping exercise that leads to an analysis of the relationship between central banks and governments. Claims that central banks should print more money to assist governments are considered. The author acknowledges that this could cause prices to rise. There is an anger in Why We're Getting Poorer. The anger about injustices is real. In the last line of the acknowledgment, the author thanks his enemies for the energy that keeps him going! Many readers of this review have lived through two crises in the global economy – the financial crisis and the pandemic. At the time of writing, it is unclear whether we are in the early stages of a historic transition in the global economy or a disorderly moment of fracture Anger, however, does not prevent the acknowledgment of nuance in policy choices. This may frustrate some activists but it will reward more readers. Making Sense of Chaos by J Doyne Farmer also aims to explain how modern economies work. Moran does so as a social scientist, Farmer as a physicist. He explains complexity economics, a framework for studying economic behaviour that draws upon the progress of modern physics and biology. A good example of this approach is the comparison made between forecasting the weather and predicting the performance of economies. He compares the progress made in predicting our weather systems with the difficulties in modelling economic behaviour. These and other examples allow the contrasting of different approaches to understanding economies. Standard economic theory assumes that every individual aims solely to maximise their satisfaction and has perfect access to all available information about every single decision. [ The Great Betrayal: The Struggle for Freedom and Democracy in the Middle East by Fawaz A Gerges – engaging read for seasoned observers Opens in new window ] In this world, every decision is made perfectly rationally. Complexity economics contends that economic decision makers have access to limited information and that decisions are imperfectly made. Individuals are 'boundedly rational' with 'a limited ability to reason'. Standard economics assumes that transactions occur only when the supply of a good or service is equal to the demand for it. Complexity theory is more generous in recognising the inherent messiness of economic life. This new approach models how the decisions of a group of individuals can cascade to influence the behaviour of the group. A nonlinear system is one where 'the whole is different from the sum of its parts'. That recognition is critical because this 'is the norm in the real world and economics is no exception'. Early chapters clearly explain these different approaches. They are lucid and authoritative. Hints of a personal memoir are lightly sprinkled throughout, describing an academic and business career devoted to exploring new concepts. As economies change we must work harder to understand them, without which we have little hope of influencing them for the benefit of societies A chapter summarising the key principles of more traditional economics is an eloquent and extremely clear summary of a huge canon of thinking. Other sections of this book are less accessible. The chapters explaining different financial market theories will be of less use to the general reader, and more to students or professionals. The chapter on the economics of climate change are difficult, but worth the effort. This book concludes by reminding the reader of how research drives progress in physics. Farmer notes, 'Progress in fundamental physics over the last 50 years illustrates how science succeeds when we have the right data to test theories, and how it is stymied when this is lacking.' The sizzle of the early part of this book lessens as the author explains the potential of more effective research that will develop better economic policies. The practicality of these proposals is a little mundane after the thrill of diagnosing a different approach to the study of economies. However, if this work only slightly reduces the possibility of a financial crisis, it is overwhelmingly worth doing. The goal of complexity economics is ambitious and necessary, the development of theories to 'guide us toward greater prosperity, make our planet healthier and help humanity thrive'. Making Sense of Chaos demonstrates the promise of economics. As economies change we must work harder to understand them, without which we have little hope of influencing them for the benefit of societies. This book explains ideas that were outside the boundaries of mainstream economics for too long. It is a compelling, though not an easy or even, read. [ Careless People: The controversial book is shocking and reveals Facebook is far worse than we could have suspected Opens in new window ] Emma Holten also grasps the power of economics in Deficit, describing it as 'the mother tongue of politics. It is the language of power'. This language is used to exclude the value of caring. It is not priced by the market and not included in the calculation of income, for individuals or for countries. In this world, if something is not priced then it has no value. That is why the core belief of feminist economics is that 'caring is the work that makes all other work possible'. Holten powerfully identifies the limitations of economic theory. She argues that economists fail to adequately recognise needs that are intrinsic to our humanity: 'being looked after when ill, receiving respect, love and recognition, performing child rearing or education'. This work argues that economics became too preoccupied with self-interest and freedom. It misses the importance of interdependence, of how we care for each other within families and communities. [ Life in Spite of Everything by Victoria Donovan: A sad and angry history of Donbas Opens in new window ] That dimension is explored in chapters on work within the home and on the evaluation of performance in the workplace. The author is correct to conclude that these issues have not received the attention that they merit from economic science. There has, however, been progress. Most democracies now support caring through their social insurance systems. The difficulties in the measurement of national income, and the exclusion of the vital intangibles, beloved by societies, are now well acknowledged by many economists. This, for example, is recognised in publications and analysis that accompany the annual Irish Budget. Improvements have been made, but it is unwise to assume that they are permanent. That is why the arguments in this book have such value. The strongest chapters describe the impact of the valuation of care on our politics and public service. The author concludes, 'A consumer cannot evaluate the utility of care in the moment of purchase.' Care is rarely purchased. If it has a monetary value, it is one that is determined by the State, not the care recipient. The rising size of health and social care budgets do demonstrate the value that societies place upon care. However, this book reminds the reader of the power of the marketplace in determining value within a society. A paradox of care is described; care 'makes all other work possible' but it is not recognised by economists like other forms of work. Most economists now accept the need to improve the foundations of their work. That work is well under way but, as with any branch of social science, it will never be complete. Likewise, the growth of the state in most democracies is a reminder that the shortcomings of free markets are well appreciated. This is not acknowledged in Deficit, but there is a wisdom that is well summarised in the final sentence of this book: 'We create so much value for each other. It's difficult to measure, but it isn't difficult to feel.' Many readers of this review have lived through two crises in the global economy – the financial crisis and the pandemic. At the time of writing, it is unclear whether we are in the early stages of a historic transition in the global economy or a disorderly moment of fracture. We must therefore be ambitious in deepening our understanding of modern economies and of the political choices shaping them. These books share that quest. They all deserve consideration in the urgent and loud debates about how we shape our economies. Paschal Donohoe is the Minister for Finance and president of the Eurogroup
Yahoo
19-02-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Lenox elementary school awarded for exemplary reading
LENOX, Mass. (WWLP) – Morris Elementary School has been recognized for its outstanding literacy program, earning this year's Exemplary Reading Program Award from the Massachusetts Reading Association (MRA), school officials announced. The award highlights schools across the state that demonstrate excellence in reading and language arts instruction. The MRA's selection committee unanimously chose Morris Elementary after reviewing the school's application and conducting an on-site visit. Cinemark theaters celebrate the Oscars The Exemplary Reading Program Award recognizes schools that excel in fostering literacy through research-based instruction, diverse learning materials, and strong comprehension strategies integrated across subjects. Schools must also show leadership in reading programs, offer a Multi-Tiered System of Support, and involve the community in literacy initiatives. Morris Elementary will be formally honored at the MRA's 54th Annual Conference in Boston next month, where a commemorative banner will be presented to the school. Superintendent Dr. William Collins expressed his pride in the school's achievement. 'It is gratifying for the state's reading association to recognize what we in Lenox already knew, and that is—Morris is a great place to learn!' said Collins. Principal Brenda Kelley echoed his excitement, emphasizing the school's dedication to student literacy. 'On behalf of everyone at Morris Elementary, we are thrilled to have received this honor,' Kelley said. 'Literacy is an essential part of student development and a priority at our school. To be honored in this way is a testament to our community's dedication to the growth of our students and the future of our society.' For more information about the program, visit the Massachusetts Reading Association website. WWLP-22News, an NBC affiliate, began broadcasting in March 1953 to provide local news, network, syndicated, and local programming to western Massachusetts. Watch the 22News Digital Edition weekdays at 4 p.m. on Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
