If you have ever listened to Mishal Husain on BBC Radio 4’s Today and wondered at her preternatural early morning calm – a serenity, I would say, that is born of utmost preparedness as well as of her essential character – then all I can tell you is that outside the studio she’s no different. Our meeting takes place the morning after the night before, when Rishi Sunak so rudely informed the nation there was to be a July election, and almost until the moment she opens her front door, I’m half expecting her to cancel: only a few hours ago, after all, she was quizzing a damp Chris Mason in Downing Street, the announcement having coincided with her regular shift as a presenter of the BBC’s News at Ten. But if I’m the last person she feels like talking to, you’d never know. Here she is in her bare feet, all smiles, welcoming me like a friend. She has even baked biscuits for the occasion: small, delightfully short biscuits that taste lightly of cumin.
Made to a traditional Pakistani recipe, they are a hospitable nod to Broken Threads, the book she has written about her family and the partition of India, the great tapestry of which she somehow stitched together even as she did her job at the BBC. On this account alone, it feels slightly miraculous. The 3am starts for Today. The unrelenting pressure of the news cycle. How on earth did she do it?
But the greater triumph is that she has managed to make such a complex story so accessible. The vexed history Broken Threads traces goes back to 1837, and then forward again to the 1980s, along the way taking in not only the dramatic events of 1947, when India achieved independence from the British and Pakistan was born amid high tension and sectarian violence, but also of the second world war, when, as she puts it, “the empire was absolutely shaken to its core, the Japanese moving through a huge swathe of east Asia, right up to the Indian border” (her account of what happened in Burma is gripping).
Huge historical figures appear in its pages, most notably Muhammed Ali Jinnah, one of the founders of Pakistan and its first governor-general, and Louis Mountbatten, King George VI’s second cousin and the last viceroy of India. But alongside them are four of those whose lives will be changed for ever by the drawing up of the new map, in the form of Husain’s grandparents: Mary and Mumtaz, and Tahira and Shahid. Their stories are singular and surprising, but in the context of her book, they’re also everyman figures. Their experience in 1947 was not unique. What happened to them, happened to so many.
It took her three years to write, but she’d been thinking about it for far longer, galvanised by the death of her father in 2016.
“For a while, I thought it would only be about my grandmothers,” she says. “I was conscious that, through them, I could tell the story of women’s lives in the 20th century, and how that played out in south Asia. But as is often the way, their husbands left behind far more that was written down – and I knew I’d have to use it.”
In the end, though, it was something her maternal grandmother, Tahira, had once written that stuck in her mind. “She said: ‘My generation were not complete for a long time after independence.’ I began to see that this was a generational story. This shift from empire to nation state is one of the dominant themes and realities of the 20th century. But I also found myself thinking of Northern Ireland, and of cross-community consent. How do you find forms of governance where communities feel that their rights are not going to be trampled; that they’re recognised, and heard, and their language protected?”
As someone whose “daily bread and butter” is British politics, Husain was fascinated by the decision-making involved in partition, “though I’m always conscious I’m looking at it with the benefit of hindsight, and through a 21st-century lens. It’s easy to ask: why weren’t they thinking in terms of unity? But they were a product of their times.”
As ever, it is salutary to realise what an “immense amount” of power rested in the hands of a very few (male) individuals. Jinnah and Mountbatten had a notoriously bad relationship: “Jinnah was not a man Mountbatten thought of highly, and he was representing millions – maybe tens of millions – of Indian Muslims.” If the foundation of Pakistan felt to a degree arbitrary to the people of India – it often did to me as I read Broken Threads – we might attribute that sense to these two, and to the Labour prime minister, Clement Attlee, who back in Britain was busy egging on the eager but out-of-his-depth viceroy.
I was chastened to discover how little I knew about partition. But Husain – kindly, perhaps – tells me such haziness isn’t limited only to ignoramuses like me. Her grandparents, who left India for Pakistan as soon as the state was founded, didn’t talk about it much themselves. Their connections helped them to travel there from India safely, avoiding the bloodshed that followed independence on 15 August, when millions of people found themselves on the wrong side of the new border (up to 1 million refugees were killed on both sides of the religious divide as Muslims travelled to Pakistan, and Hindus and Sikhs made their way to India).
Mary and Mumtaz, her paternal grandparents, and their four small children were booked on a train from Delhi to Lahore the day after independence – a route that would take them through the Punjab, where some of the worst violence was happening. But at the last moment a British RAF officer offered them a place on a flight, and they changed their minds. What a decision. When the train arrived in Lahore, every last person on it had been murdered. Meanwhile, on her mother’s side, Shahid was already in Rawalpindi. However, Tahira and their children only got out of Shimla, where they were summering, thanks to Field Marshal Sir Claude Auchinleck, the commander-in-chief of the Indian army (Shahid was his private secretary and the two men were close friends). On Auchinleck’s orders, a Hindu officer brought them down safely from the hills – they were advised to use family nicknames in conversation, a means of disguising their Muslim identity – after which they were flown to Pakistan on his private plane.
In other words, they were lucky – and it was this, Husain believes, that made them reticent. “I think it reduced their capacity to dwell on it because they felt that so many other people had suffered much more. I also think that in Pakistan, to harken back to how things were in India was not a good look. A sort of narrative developed: of the true Pakistanis, who were born on its land, and of those who, like my grandparents, had come from elsewhere. You might look unpatriotic [if you expressed regrets].”
But in the end, she puzzled less over the “how” of her grandparents’ situation than the “why”. In some ways, the decision to leave India was unfathomable: they put behind them everything that they knew and loved; the continuing enmity and suspicion between the two nations meant that Shahid, for instance, was able to go back only once – he wanted to visit his father’s grave – and only then because he’d become friends with an Indian high commissioner in Islamabad who helped him get a visa: “In Shahid’s diary, there’s an entry that made me wonder if the decision was made at the last minute: Auchinleck wanted to put him forward for the Indian army [Shahid was a Sandhurst-trained officer], so he could have stayed. What I would say now is that I don’t think they thought it was a big decision at the time. They wouldn’t have imagined how relations [between the two countries] would deteriorate; they might even have imagined a future federation. Shahid’s home city, Lucknow, was so important to him… and yet he made only that one visit in the 1970s.”
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Her grandparents’ lives are fascinating: Shahid’s military career means that he meets Jinnah and Mountbatten; his relationship with Auchinleck, a brilliant general and an unexpectedly modern figure (he was not racist as others were) is unlikely and very interesting. Meanwhile, on the other side, there’s Mumtaz, a young doctor from Multan who falls in love with a nurse called Mary, whose background is Anglo-Indian (she is from southern India, but her father was an Irishman), and when they marry, he does not ask her to give up her faith, thus risking rejection by his family. Her sister, Husain’s aunt Anne, is still alive and kicking at the age of 99, and living not in India or even Pakistan, but in Oldham, Greater Manchester (there are, I should say, an remarkably high number of nuns in the book, which isn’t what I was expecting, and a helpful reminder that identity is never straightforward).
Husain’s father, Imtiaz, a urologist, and her mother, Shama, a TV producer turned teacher, met when their parents (her grandparents) found themselves living next door to each other in Rawalpindi. By the time Husain was born – in Northampton in 1973 – they had moved to Britain, though her childhood was itinerant: the family went to live in the UAE when she was a toddler, and then in Saudi Arabia, at which point she was sent to boarding school in Kent. But the family’s connection with Pakistan remained strong: Husain thinks they visited more often than they would have done had they been living in Britain. She spent the summer holidays in Rawalpindi, and when I ask how her grandparents seemed to her as a girl, she talks of their faith, always lightly worn (“no proselytising”), their integrity and fastidiousness, their anti-materialism.
“I’m struck by this every time I go to Pakistan. My sense of self when I’m there is not as individualistic. Someone will say: ‘So-and-so’s relative has died, we must go and visit.’ That’s how I was brought up, with this very real sense you should be there for other people. It’s embedded in me.” (Right on cue, she now gently reminds me to try her baking.)
After Cambridge, where she studied law, her first job in journalism was at Bloomberg. She joined the BBC news channel in 1998 as a junior producer. “I think my decision to be a journalist was definitely influenced by the fact that my parents were part of a diaspora,” she says. “Diaspora communities tend to be big news consumers. I grew up with the World Service, and CNN.” She was always listening in to her parents’ talk: of the famine in Cambodia (“that was why I had to eat my food”), of the assassination of Anwar Sadat in Egypt, and Indira Gandhi in India. “This hush [would fall] when they first heard the news about something.” Was TV journalism sexist when she began? She shakes her head. “I didn’t really experience the dinosaur era. I joined at a time when there was a much bigger effort at representation.” Such representation is vital, she thinks, “in terms of the stories you cover, and the lens through which you look at them”.
She joined Today in 2013 – a big deal all round. “It took me about three years to feel settled,” she says. “It’s such an exacting place to be, though it’s also incredibly rewarding. It has taught me that the jobs which demand a lot of you, at least in my experience, are also the ones where you get a lot back. There is an intensity about it, and a sense of responsibility. People are listening. The direction an interview takes can really influence a story.”
Is it addictive?
“I don’t know about that, but it’s hard to walk away from for that reason. You get to talk to incredible people.”
Is it harder than it used to be to get politicians to answer questions? Perhaps. “And attention spans have also got shorter.” She is exacting with herself, often coming off air and wondering what she might have done differently. What about chemistry? When she started, John Humphrys was still around; now the team is getting younger. Amol Rajan arrived first, and now she and Nick Robinson and Justin Webb have also been joined by Emma Barnett, late of Woman’s Hour. Who does she most like to present with? She laughs. Am I deliberately trying to make her life more difficult? “It’s very collegiate,” she insists. “I’ve learned so much, because you see how other people use their time. You know, I’ll see how fast they write their cues, and I’m, like: ‘Oh my God, I’m so slow in comparison.’”
Often, she doesn’t know who her interviewees will be until 4am on the day itself. I shudder at this – the deathly hour – but by now, she’s blase when it comes to alarm clocks. “You do have to be disciplined,” she says. “I’m in bed at eight to get up at three. But it’s a privilege to work at that time in the morning. Who do I see? Mostly, I see security guards, Uber drivers, delivery men and cleaners. I’m going to work to do a job of such privilege, and I don’t ever take it for granted.”
Her sons are more or less grownup now (one is at university, the other two – twins – have A-levels coming up). “I’m on the brink of moving into a stage in life where maybe I’ll be able to have some weekends away with my husband,” she says, sounding almost amazed at the thought. But yes, there was a lot of wrangling when they were small.
The husband in question is Meekal, who works for an investment firm. “I don’t really like reducing it to: I’ve got a supportive husband, because that’s not all it is. I think I’ve been fortunate. Obviously, you choose the person you are going to marry, but you don’t really know then what life is going to throw out; what it’s going to be like to have children with someone, or when your parents are ill, or frankly when you’re just faced with the daily grind. I think we’ve squabbled over things like housework over the years, and those issues can end up being very big. But he is the person I share my work dilemmas with… there’s no way I could have had my career without feeling that it was a true partnership, some days one of us flat out and the other picking up the slack.” She pauses. When they marked their 20th wedding anniversary last year, she put a picture of the day on Instagram. “I was hesitant about it, but then I thought: I’ve so much to be grateful for. People in my wider network have had very different experiences, and I just want to recognise that I have been blessed. That’s how I see the world.”
Broken Threads: My Family from Empire to Independence is published by Fourth Estate (£18.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
