British journalist Mishal Husain’s Broken Threads: My Family from Empire to Independence is a compelling blend of personal memoir and history, using her grandparents’ lives as a lens to explore South Asia’s complex journey from British rule to independence. With an engaging narrative style, Husain navigates the nuances of colonial and post-colonial identity, making this book a must-read for anyone interested in understanding the historical threads that weave through South Asia’s present.
Husain begins her story with a delicate symbol: a brocade sari border from her grandparents’ wedding, repurposed by her cousin into a shawl for her own wedding. This frayed, beautiful artifact captures the essence of a history that is both lived and retold across generations. However, Broken Threads is not just a personal memoir or an Instagram-ready nostalgic journey; instead, it delves into the roots of her family’s narrative with a storyteller’s insight and a journalist’s rigor. Husain used family artifacts like unpublished memoirs, recorded tapes, and even conversations with her elderly relatives to create a rich historical framework for understanding her grandparents’ lives and choices.
The book devotes separate chapters to each grandparent—Mary, Mumtaz, Shahid, and Tahirah—who were born in pre-Partition India and lived through the monumental changes that marked the 20th century in South Asia. Their lives paint a portrait of a world now almost lost to time, capturing the emotional gravity of moving from colonial rule to independence and partition.
Husain’s account shines by balancing her personal connection to the story with a broader historical perspective. While she doesn’t consider herself a historian, she approaches history with precision, exploring the sociopolitical atmosphere that shaped her grandparents’ generation. Her grandfather Shahid’s career as the private secretary to British commander Claude Auchinleck offers a unique insider’s view of the British command in South Asia, while her other grandfather, Mumtaz, provides a personal take on daily life through his unpublished memoirs.
Through these stories, Husain offers readers insight into the South Asian Muslim experience, particularly for those, like her grandmothers, who challenged traditional roles by entering professions like nursing and medicine. Husain contextualizes her grandmother Tahirah’s journey in the broader intellectual landscape of figures like Syed Ahmad Khan, who promoted Western education for Muslims, representing a shift from nostalgia to modernity in post-1857 India.
Writing about her grandparents’ lives in an era of heightened political tension presented challenges for Husain, both personally and academically. While she initially set out to write a narrower social history, Husain realized that understanding her grandparents’ decisions—especially their choice to settle in Pakistan—required an exploration of political events and motivations on a much larger scale. This task was particularly challenging as she aimed to portray these decisions with sensitivity to the diverse communities involved.
The book’s narrative reveals her family’s difficulty adjusting to the new country after independence, particularly her grandmother’s lingering sense of loss for friends, places, and society left behind in India. This feeling of displacement and nostalgia speaks to the struggles of the entire generation who lived through partition, often quietly enduring loss while focusing on making the best of their new lives in Rawalpindi and beyond.
Husain’s journey is also shaped by her experiences growing up in a multicultural context across the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Britain. While she visited Pakistan regularly, her sense of identity encompasses both sides of the border, with family roots reaching back to towns now in India. This sense of dual heritage comes through in her writing, where she attempts to bridge the gap between the two countries’ histories for British readers unfamiliar with the depth of this shared past.
For readers in India and Pakistan, Broken Threads provides a refreshing take on a history often reduced to partition violence. By exploring events from 1918 to 1947, Husain highlights a series of political and constitutional tensions that defined the British exit from South Asia. Her exploration of these events captures the complexity of the transition period and its impact on the lives of ordinary people.
In the end, Husain’s Broken Threads achieves something truly significant—it brings together personal stories within a larger historical tapestry, preserving the experiences of a generation whose voices are rapidly fading. Her book is a tribute to the resilience, pain, and quiet heroism of her grandparents’ generation. For readers, it offers an intimate and powerful account of South Asia’s journey through colonization, independence, and beyond.