South Asia's fault-lines of identity

Joya Chatterji's book explores the complexities of South Asian history and identity, providing a wide sweep of the many realities of a crucial region in the world

Shadows At Noon: The South Asian Twentieth Century

Author: Joya Chatterji

Publisher: Penguin Random House

Pages: 842

Price: Rs 1,299

Even for a historian of modern India with a daunting reputation, the topic of this book runs the risk of intellectual overextension. Joya Chatterji’s first two books were scholarly explorations of communalism in Bengal from the early 1930s to partition in Bengal Divided: Hindu Communalism and Partition, enhanced by The Spoils of Partition: Bengal and India, which examines how the state was socially, politically and economically devastated by partition. But in Shadows at Noon, the author manages skilfully to keep an ambitious narrative on