I’ve been reading Broken Threads: my family from Empire to Independence, the memoir of journalist, Mishal Husain. This engrossing story connects her family history with the larger forces at work in the early twentieth century as India moved towards partition. The stories of her grandparents offer perspectives that sometimes run counter to official versions of these complicated events. 

This is not a review of the book, though I would highly recommend it. What is OF NOTE is the way in which the book reveals the importance of individual family stories, even partial ones, in understanding the past in all its complexity.   

Three of Husain’s grandparents left accounts of the period, up to and just after partition. Only one of these was produced with publication in mind. Her paternal grandfather began his memoir shortly after his wife died as a way of holding onto his memories of her. His writing remained in the family. Tapes of her maternal grandmother, recalling family life, came to light in the 1980s. It was Husain’s maternal grandfather, Shahid Hamid, who published Disastrous Twilight: a personal record of the partition of India, in 1986. This work drew on diaries he’d kept during the period of partition when, as a military man, he had contact with the Viceroy, Mountbatten. From these accounts, emerge rich details of daily life, inter-faith marriage, changes in education, medicine and the military, particularly within the Muslim community in the last decades of British rule in India. As well as personal observations of the politics of that time. Without these accounts, Husain could not have written this book.  

Understanding the past has never been more important. So many conflict points around the world have deep roots going back decades if not centuries. Views are easily polarised through the fast pace of social media. Looking back at the rapid changes that drove through the 20th century, it’s so easy to forget, or even have no knowledge of, what came before.  

At a personal level, it’s worth understanding the people who came before you, in particular the social conditions in which they grew up. Looking at my own family story I discovered that my great-grandmother, who died less than a 100 years ago, couldn’t write her name. Tracing her history back, I found that by the time compulsory schooling for all children was introduced in 1870 she was already too old, at ten, to benefit. She seems to have been a bright woman who ran a bakery but had to sign official documents with X. I read up on successive Education Acts to see how increasing school provision shaped the life-chances for the next three generations. On one side, an important strand of our family history includes the way it is intersected by the history of education in the UK.

Understanding my great-grandmother and the circumstances in which she lived, has led me to more stories. It’s been a rich experience. I’ll be offering these stories to my children. It puts a new perspective on the many years of their education to post-graduate level. Handing on such stories is a gift to succeeding generations. It can lead to better understanding of why those who went before might have behaved as they did.

Have you ever wondered if a story in your family was worth telling? It is. Even if it’s a particular angle, or partial account. It’s worth writing the specifics of experience, to hand on. That way, you keep the threads between the generations connected. It’s particularly important for ‘ordinary’ people, whose lives rarely figure in official histories, to write their version of events. This happened in World War Two with Mass Observation, which still continues with some projects that record ordinary lives.  

 So what to note?

• Did you keep a journal during Covid? If so, left for your grandchildren to read, it will take them right into a global story.
• Is there a story of how education had a significant impact on your family?
• Perhaps it’s a workplace story?
• What about changing technology. I was using a typewriter up until the late 1980s, now we have AI. My grandchildren have no idea what a telephone with a dial is.
• If you don’t want to write, and you have a smart phone, use its voice recognition software to do the writing for you.
• Climate change – if you are a gardener, or a farmer you must have witnessed shifts in seasons, the effects on plants and insect life.
• Do you have an elderly relative who likes to talk about the past? Why not record their stories?

Stories matter. Mishal Husain’s book is a timely reminder that, they matter even more at times of great change. It’s worth writing yours if not for the world at large, then for those that come after you to understand better where they have come from. Leave a few threads for children or grandchildren to pick up and connect to their lives. That way, the texture of life lived can be felt years later.

Pamela Johnson, August, 2024