Professor Joya Chatterji of Cambridge University has become something of a global star after winning the Wolfson History Prize in December last year for her book, Shadows at Noon: The South Asian Twentieth Century.
She had earlier won Eastern Eye’s Arts, Culture and Theatre Award (ACTA) for the book in the history category, which was introduced for the first time last year.
The Wolfson, worth £50,000, is described as “the most prestigious history writing prize in the UK”. Past winners include Simon Schama, Eric Hobsbawm, Amanda Vickery, Antony Beevor, Christopher Bayly and Antonia Fraser.
Chatterji, a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, has long been considered an authority on south Asia. But her real influence lies in the way she has been able to mould and inspire her PhD students who come from all over the world.
Although she has had to step down from day to day teaching because of poor health – she is now emeritus professor of South Asian history at Cambridge – she draws strength from supervising her students. She hopes her love of history is being passed on to her “brilliant and beloved graduate students”, to whom her book is dedicated. They appear to adore her, and kept asking her affectionately about her “bonker’s book” while she was writing the 842-page Shadows at Noon.
“To some extent the students become part of my family,” she says. “They WhatsApp me at all times of the day or night to discuss (for example) whether they should have an abortion.”
She asks them to call her Joya, not Professor. She especially enjoys engaging with students from Pakistan. She finds they have been “taught nothing about why East Pakistan broke away from West Pakistan to form Bangladesh in 1971, and are shocked when told the former constituted 55 per cent of the population of Pakistan”.
“Are you sure? I mean, really?” they react.
In Shadows at Noon, “I suggest that India and Pakistan had more in common than is often understood,” she says.
The Wolfson judging panel, which included historians Mary Beard, Richard Evans, Sudhir Hazareesingh, Carole Hillenbrand and Diarmaid MacCulloch, called the book “a captivating history of modern South Asia, full of fascinating insights about the lives of its peoples. Written with verve and energy, this book beautifully blends the personal and the historical.”
David Cannadine, chair of the panel, told the prize giving ceremony in London: “Shadows at Noon is a highly ambitious history of twentieth-century South Asia that defies easy categorisation, combining rigorous historical research with personal reminiscence and family anecdotes. Chatterji writes with wit and perception, shining a light on themes that have shaped the subcontinent during this period.”
The judges also said: “This unique academic work – interwoven with Chatterji’s own reflections on growing up in India — adopts a conversational writing style, and takes a
thematic rather than chronological approach. Everyday experiences of food, cinema and the household are given an equal footing to discussions about politics and nationhood. As a result, the cultural vibrancy of South Asia shines through the research, allowing readers a more nuanced understanding of the region.”
Chatterji (“Joy” to her five siblings among whom she is the second youngest) was born in Delhi in 1964 to a Bengali father, Jognath Chatterji, and an English mother, Valerie Ann Sawyer. She was passionate about history from a young age, stood “first class first” in her exam results at Lady Shri Ram College, a well known institution for women in Delhi, and came in 1985 to Trinity College, Cambridge, where she did a three-year degree in two and then a PhD in the history of Hindu communalism in Bengal. After a spell teaching at the London School of Economics, she returned to Cambridge.
Looking back on her life, she says she was always a curious child. By and by, she asked herself: “How did we become ‘Indians’, ‘Pakistanis’ and ‘Bangladeshis’ after the two great subdivisions of the subcontinent?”
Another question was about “why people – who, for the most part, seemed intelligent and warm-hearted – were so full of hatred towards certain groups in society.”
She remembers supposedly intelligent and educated journalists at The Times of India in Delhi “screaming and shouting” as they followed an India-Pakistan cricket match “as though it was war”.
Today, she finds it easier to do her writing in India, although home is Cambridge, where she lives with fellow historian husband, Prof Anil Seal.
Although Cambridge is an English idyll, she says she feels more “cerebral” at the university, whereas at the family home she has inherited in Delhi, “I see a fabulous forest. There is one particular peacock who comes looking for me. I hear parrots screeching. In Cambridge I’m not able to listen to my internal rhythm. India is where I really feel at home, it unblocks me.”
For British Asians in particular, what makes Shadows at Noon accessible are the many cultural references. Books she refers to include Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses; Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy; Nirad Chaudhuri’s The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian; Amitabh Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines; and The Prisoner by Omar Shahid Hamid, a former Pakistani policeman.
She also makes many arguments using messages in movies: Satyajit Ray’s trilogy, Pather Panchali, Aparajito and Apur Sansar (“among the best films you will ever see”); the Amitabh Bachchan and Rekha starrer, Silsila; Do Bigha Zameen; Mother India; Umrao Jaan; Devdas; Sahib, Bibi aur Ghulam; Sholay; Hum Aapke Hain Kaun; Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge; and LOC: Kargil.
Over the years, she has urged the BBC and other TV networks to “make partition a British story. Migration has been introduced on to the GCSE syllabus and then the A level syllabus. That includes the fact that there are people who are not Caucasians in Britain, how they’ve been coming over, waves and waves. But it’s taken years and years and years of effort. It’s been a goal of my life to make people wake up, and say, ‘Hang on. There are people here in Britain who happen to be Punjabis and Bengalis. Why would that be so? Do you think it might be something to do with partition?’ ”
However, she reckons it’s too soon to deal with Winston Churchill’s perceived imperialism and racism: “I now pass the baton on. Younger people have taken up the fight. We have to first win this battle (over migration). Churchill is God-like. You should see the reactions because a few of my students run outreach classes for students trying to get into Cambridge from the state sector. And one or two of them have done classes on Churchill. It is basically to teach them how we do history. It is an incomplete, complicated subject, in which there are no clear baddies or goodies. They practically had stones pelted at them for suggesting that Churchill was in some way implicated in the Bengal famine, which he was.”
