Reading Update

[jaggedwolf]

A trio of self-explanatory titles. Time to tilt back towards fiction lol.

The Great Partition: The Making Of India and Pakistan by Yasmin Khan

Overview of partition, probably a better read if you have more background knowledge.

While the scale and degree of violence surrounding partition was as sobering as I expected, the particular mixture of apathy at the top and violent bigotry on the ground was the part that really stuck with me. You have:

• The British speedrunning their way out of there because they really don’t want to spend money on this colony anymore
• None of the British or Indian political leadership predicting the mass movement of people even though a huge part of both Congress-led and League-led politics leveraged the increasing religion-based violence in persuading their bases - of course people moved to where they wouldn’t be a minority, between the violence and the public proclamations about for whom each nation would be for
• The sheer incompetence of the actual partitioning. Not only the poor choices of the Radcliffe line itself, but that the official maps were only released after both countries’ Independence days, leaving so many people uncertain as to which side of their line their homes or communities would be
• Long-standing neighbours violently turning on each other. Book makes a point of how attempts at even-handed treatment of Muslims, Sikhs and Hindus often just reinforced the separation of them, and religious endogamy probably continued that separation
  

Economics Explained by Robert Heilbroner and Lester Thurow

Short (~240 pages) economics primer from the 80s. Would recommend, was straightforward and evenhanded in its explanations and felt still relevant. All concrete examples use the US economy.

Singapore: A Biography by Mark Ravinder Frost and Yu-Mei Balasingamchow

Holding back a joke about how biographies typically end with their subject’s death and yet this one ends in ‘65. A vivid history of Singapore from ~1400 to 1965, with a particular incorporation of eyewitness accounts I enjoyed.

Random notes:

• Totally didn’t know we had a perspective on the British arrival and particularly of Raffles’ via the autobiography of Munshi Abdullah, a Malayan writer who became Raffles’ scribe
• It’s always interesting to see the slow formalization of immigration across the 19th and 20th centuries, and Singapore is no different - there’s the initial limitation of unskilled male labor as 1860s SG reaches a gender ration of 14:1, the increased registering of Chinese and Indian immigrants in the wake of communist fears for the former and the 1915 Sepoy Mutiny for the latter, etc.
• Lead-up to WW2 has the British Special Branch more concerned about raiding and deporting suspected Chinese communists than any of the Japanese spies, especially with the latter more interested in espionage than sabotage
• A recurring question whenever I read about SG in the 50s or 60s: Has any political movement ever benefited from boycotting elections? We see multiple parties in SG alone do that and it absolutely never benefits them.