India@75: Meghaa Gupta’s After Midnight is post-independent India’s history in a nutshell

The concept of scaling rarely works when a country like India, whose past not only continues to inform the present in more ways than one but also provides different imagination for its future. Even if as an experiment, one was to consider condensing an array of India’s achievements, failures, and contested truths and untruths, it’s natural to ask: Can it do justice? The challenge becomes even more glorious when one wants to target such a primer for the country’s young readers. Seems impossible, right? However, Meghaa Gupta has pulled it off quite effortlessly with her book After Midnight: A History of Independent India (Puffin Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House).

With rich illustrations by Sayan Mukherjee and a plethora of anecdotes that feature popular figures like Laila Tyabji, Karan Mahajan, etc., fun facts, and timelines, reading this book is a uniquely enjoyable experience. Because it not only cements the belief that history can be more appreciated when it’s told through engaging stories but also stands testament to the idea of remaining open to learning forever, as the book really helped me understand several aspects that I perhaps missed in a classroom set up as a young(er) learner.

After Midnight is divided into four parts and also includes an additional chapter on the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Beginning from the time when India was on the cusp of freedom and the Partition appeared inevitable, the book covers how a “newly independent India was a land stripped of its riches and wracked by disease and famine”, along with facing issues of caste, class, and gender disparity, came to a necessary understanding of how to “best serve the interests of all its people.”

Right from constructing the narrative around the framing of the constitution, led by B. R. Ambedkar, to getting princely states to agree to be part of the independent nation to bringing in reforms to build a modern India, the short, but informative, chapters in this book take you through the country’s history in a much more consumable manner. And at the same time being a well-researched and presented work.

In particular, Decades After Independence: A Timeline is also available towards the end of the book to present an overarching view that makes you appreciate what roadblocks the country and its founding members had to brave to reach where it’s today. However, one of the appreciable things about this book is that it doesn’t present only the “rosy” side of Indian democracy. It outlines all the trying times it has endured and shares them in a sensitive language that’d definitely make children question the disparity, inequality, and an increasingly intolerant nation we’ve become.

The author, who’s also a co-founder of the Green Literature Festival, enlists an array of such challenges facing India in several chapters, and seems to underline what Ambedkar noted regarding the necessary and sufficient condition for a thriving democracy: “Mere political democracy, exercised through the right to vote, would remain futile if there was no equality in the social and economic life of India.”

Though the country faced several external threats throughout its life as an independent nation, most of its challenges remained internal, as the author clearly establishes. Including the country finding its feet to brave a solid defensive nation in warlike situations, educating and nourishing its population, conducting free and fair elections, building scientific temperament, encouraging advancement in science and technology, and handling conflicts democratically.

But, alongside the above (often crudely get billed as ‘serious’ issues), young readers will also be amused reading that in Thumba (in Kerala) in 1963, when India was foraying into space with a rocket launch, “to carry parts of the rocket to the launch site” bicycles and bullock carts were used! And that Shyam Benegal’s 1976 movie Manthan was India’s first crowdfunded movie: “Five lakh dairy farmers gave two rupees each to produce the movie.”

While young readers would definitely get a glimpse of almost everything, they wouldn’t get to know the hard-fought freedom that the country’s queer population attained in September 2018 when a part of Section 377 was read down. It somehow escapes the author’s attention it seems. Perhaps it always does when the histories of India are written. One wonders then how will the necessary conversations that everyone keeps talking about in terms of making children more aware of LGBTQIA+ struggles when popular titles like After Midnight will choose to skip even a passing mention of grassroots-level queer movements in India.

Despite this, the book is a fine read. And I also keep faith—someday the edition will get revised?—like historian Manu S. Pillai does, who writes in the book’s foreword, summarising the country’s 75 years of freedom in a single line: “Our time too has its moments of greatness, and seasons of tragedy. And yet we too keep faith.”

Saurabh Sharma (He/They) is a Delhi-based queer writer and freelance journalist.

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