Nisid Hajari

Last updated
Nisid Hajari
Jaipur LitFest 2016.jpg
Hajari at the 2016 Jaipur Literature Festival
OccupationAuthor, writer
LanguageEnglish
NationalityIndian
Notable awards2016 Colby Award

Nisid Hajari is an Indian-American writer, editor and foreign affairs analyst. He is the author of Midnight's Furies: The Deadly Legacy of India's Partition, winner of the 2016 Colby Award. [1]

Contents

Personal life

He was born in Bombay and raised in Seattle, Washington. He has lived in New York, Hong Kong, New Delhi, London and Singapore.

Education

Hajari graduated from Princeton in 1990 with a B.A. in English. He earned a master's degree in Comparative Literature at Columbia in 1996. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Career

Hajari is Asia editor for Bloomberg View, the editorial board of Bloomberg News. He writes about Asian politics, history and economics. [2]

Earlier, he spent a decade as an editor at Newsweek International and Newsweek magazine in New York. He served as deputy to Fareed Zakaria from 2002 to 2006 and then as Foreign Editor and Managing Editor of the U.S. edition of the magazine from 2006 to 2011. During his tenure, the magazine won over 50 reporting, photography and digital awards for its international coverage.

From 1997 to 2001, he worked as a writer and editor for Time magazine in Hong Kong. Before moving to Asia, he spent time as a rock critic for Entertainment Weekly and a book critic for The Village Voice . He has written for The New York Times , Financial Times , Esquire , Slate , The Washington Post , Foreign Policy and Condé Nast Traveler , among other publications.

He has appeared as a foreign affairs commentator on CNN, BBC, NBC, MSNBC, CBC and National Public Radio, as well as The Charlie Rose Show .

Writing

Hajari's "Midnight's Furies" is a narrative history of the 1947 Partition of India and Pakistan, during which as many as a million people may have lost their lives. It was named one of the best books of 2015 by NPR, [3] the Seattle Times, [4] Quartz, [5] Amazon [6] and the Daily Beast. [7] The Wall Street Journal called it "an engaging and incisive contribution to the vast literature on Partition," while author William Dalrymple, writing in The Guardian , praised Hajari for making "the complex and tragic story of the great divide into a page-turner." [8] [9]

The book is the 21st winner of the William E. Colby Award, for a first book on military, intelligence or international affairs. [10] It was named a finalist for the Council on Foreign Relations' Arthur Ross Book Award, the Shakti Bhatt Prize and the Tata Literature Live! First Book Award. [11] It reached No. 1 on the Indian nonfiction bestseller list.

Hajari also helped edit the 2013 essay collection, "Reimagining India: Unlocking the Potential of Asia's Next Superpower."

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Salman Rushdie</span> Indian-born British-American novelist (born 1947)

Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie is an Indian-born British-American novelist. His work often combines magic realism with historical fiction and primarily deals with connections, disruptions, and migrations between Eastern and Western civilizations, typically set on the Indian subcontinent. Rushdie's second novel, Midnight's Children (1981), won the Booker Prize in 1981 and was deemed to be "the best novel of all winners" on two occasions, marking the 25th and the 40th anniversary of the prize.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Partition of India</span> 1947 division of British India

The Partition of India in 1947 was the change of political borders and the division of other assets that accompanied the dissolution of the British Raj in the Indian subcontinent and the creation of two independent dominions in South Asia: India and Pakistan. The Dominion of India is today the Republic of India, and the Dominion of Pakistan—which at the time comprised two regions lying on either side of India—is now the Islamic Republic of Pakistan and the People's Republic of Bangladesh. The partition was outlined in the Indian Independence Act 1947. The change of political borders notably included the division of two provinces of British India, Bengal and Punjab. The majority Muslim districts in these provinces were awarded to Pakistan and the majority non-Muslim to India. The other assets that were divided included the British Indian Army, the Royal Indian Navy, the Royal Indian Air Force, the Indian Civil Service, the railways, and the central treasury. Provisions for self-governing independent Pakistan and India legally came into existence at midnight on 14 and 15 August 1947 respectively.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dilip Shanghvi</span> Indian Businessman

Dilip Shanghvi is an Indian billionaire businessman and one of the country's richest people. He founded Sun Pharmaceuticals. The Government of India awarded him the civilian honour of the Padma Shri in 2016. India Today magazine ranked him 8th in India's most powerful people of 2017 list.

<i>Freedom at Midnight</i>

Freedom at Midnight (1975) is a non-fiction book by Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre about the events around the Indian independence movement and partition. It details the last year of the British Raj, from 1947 to 1948, beginning with the appointment of Lord Mountbatten of Burma as the last viceroy of British India, and ending with the death and funeral of Mahatma Gandhi.

The following is a timeline of the Kashmir conflict, a territorial conflict between India, Pakistan and, to a lesser degree, China. India and Pakistan have been involved in four wars and several border skirmishes over the issue.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Khurshid Hasan Khurshid</span> Secretary of Governor-General of Pakistan

Khurshid Hasan Khurshid (Urdu: خورشید حسن خورشید) pronounced [xu:r'ʃi:d ɦəsəɳ xu:r'ʃi:d], popularly known by his acronym, K. H. Khurshid, was the Private Secretary of Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the first Governor-General of Pakistan. He served Jinnah from 1944 until his death in 1948. Khurshid was the first elected President of Azad Jammu and Kashmir from 1959 to 1964. He was also the instigator of the Constitution of Azad Kashmir.

The William E. Colby Military Writers' Award was established in 1999 by the William E. Colby Military Writers' Symposium at Norwich University in Vermont in order to recognize "a first work of fiction or non-fiction that has made a major contribution to the understanding of intelligence operations, military history, or international affairs." It is named in honor of William Egan Colby. As of 2021, Alex Kershaw is the chair of its selection committee.

Padmaja Naidu was an Indian freedom fighter and politician who was the 4th Governor of West Bengal from 3 November 1956 to 1 June 1967. She was daughter of Sarojini Naidu.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Yadavindra Singh</span> Last ruling Indian Maharaja of Patiala from 1938–1947

Yadavindra Singh was the 9th and last ruling Maharaja of Patiala from 1938 to 1971. He was also a diplomat, sports administrator and former cricketer who played in one Test in 1934.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Chandulal Madhavlal Trivedi</span>

Sir Chandulal Madhavlal Trivedi KCSI, CIE, OBE, ICS was an Indian administrator and civil servant who served as the first Indian governor of the state of Punjab after Independence in 1947. He subsequently served as the first Governor of Andhra Pradesh from its creation in 1953 until 1957.

Anuradha Roy is an Indian novelist, journalist and editor. She has written five novels: An Atlas of Impossible Longing (2008), The Folded Earth (2011), Sleeping on Jupiter (2015), All the Lives We Never Lived (2018), and The Earthspinner (2021).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">1947 Rawalpindi massacres</span> 1947 massacres of Sikhs and Hindus in Rawalpindi

The 1947 Rawalpindi massacres refer to widespread violence, massacres, and rapes of Hindus and Sikhs by Muslim mobs in the Rawalpindi Division of the Punjab Province of British India in March 1947. The violence preceded the partition of India and was instigated and perpetrated by the Muslim League National Guards—the militant wing of the Muslim League—as well as local cadres and politicians of the League, demobilised Muslim soldiers, local officials and policemen. It followed the fall of a coalition government of the Punjab Unionists, Indian National Congress and Akali Dal, achieved through a six-week campaign by the Muslim League. The riots left between 2,000 and 7,000 Sikhs and Hindus dead, and set off their mass exodus from Rawalpindi Division. 80,000 Sikhs and Hindus were estimated to have left the Division by the end of April. The incidents were the first instance of partition-related violence in Punjab to show clear manifestations of ethnic cleansing, and marked the beginning of systematic violence against women that accompanied the partition, seeing rampant sexual violence, rape, and forced conversions, with many women committing mass suicides along with their children, and many killed by their male relatives, for fear of abduction and rape. The events are sometimes referred to as the Rape of Rawalpindi.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ruchir Sharma</span> Investor and fund manager

Ruchir Sharma is an investor, author, fund manager and columnist for the Financial Times. He is the head of Rockefeller Capital Management's international business, and was an emerging markets investor at Morgan Stanley Investment Management.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Suresh H. Advani</span> Oncologist who pioneered hematopoietic stem cell transplantation in India

Suresh Hariram Advani is an oncologist who pioneered hematopoietic stem cell transplantation in India. Struck by poliomyelitis at the age of 8 years, the wheelchair-using doctor studied at Grant Medical College, Mumbai, following which he worked at Tata Memorial Centre for several years as a medical oncologist. Now he consults at S. L. Raheja Hospital and Surya Hospital. He gained experience in the field of bone marrow transplantation from the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Seattle, Washington.

Tamal Bandyopadhyay is an Indian business journalist, known for his weekly column on banking and finance Banker's Trust published in Business Standard, a leading Indian business daily. He had started this column in Mint, an Indian business daily by HT Media Ltd.

<i>Midnights Furies: The Deadly Legacy of Indias Partition</i>

Midnight's Furies: The Deadly Legacy of India's Partition is a non-fiction book by Nisid Hajari, published in 2015 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. The book chronicles the partition of India and the riots and other violence that followed. It was the 2016 recipient of the Colby Award.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">1947 Jammu massacres</span> Genocidal massacres in Jammu

After the Partition of India, during October–November 1947 in the Jammu region of the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir, many Muslims were massacred and others driven away to West Punjab. The killings were carried out by extremist Hindus and Sikhs, aided and abetted by the forces of Maharaja Hari Singh. The activists of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) played a key role in planning and executing the riots. An estimated 20,000–100,000 Muslims were massacred. Subsequently, many non-Muslims were massacred by Pakistani tribesmen, in the Mirpur region of today's Pakistani administered Kashmir, and also in the Rajouri area of Jammu division.

Khurshid Anwar was an activist of All-India Muslim League, heading its private militia, the Muslim League National Guard. Described as a "shadowy figure" and "complete adventurer", he is generally addressed as a "Major" in Pakistani sources. He was a key figure in the rise of the Muslim League during 1946–47, organising its campaigns in Punjab and North-West Frontier Province, prior to India's partition. After the independence of Pakistan, he was instrumental in organising the tribal invasion of Kashmir, leading to the Indo-Pakistani War of 1947.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Arun M. Kumar</span> Chairman and CEO at KPMG in India

Arun M. Kumar is Managing Partner with Celesta Capital. Kumar also serves as Chair of the Wadhwani Institute of Technology and Policy, and he is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Kumar is on the board of Indiaspora, an organization that links accomplished and influential people of Indian origin in many countries to be a force for good in enhancing the relationships between their country of residence and India. Kumar has had a long association with the US India Business Council and is an advisor to its board of directors.

<i>The Night Diary</i> 2018 young adult by Veera Hiranandani

The Night Diary is a young adult novel written by American writer Veera Hiranandani and published by Penguin Random House in 2018. It is set in 1947, during the months before and after the independence of India and subsequent division with Pakistan, and is written as diary entries from the perspective of Nisha, a girl who has just celebrated her twelfth birthday along with her twin brother, Amil.

References

  1. "Nisid Hajari Wins 2016 Colby Award for Best Military Book". Office of Communications. 2016-01-27. Archived from the original on 2016-04-22. Retrieved 2016-05-02.
  2. "Bloomberg View Announces New Editorial Hires, Global Expansion". Bloomberg L.P. 2013-04-26. Retrieved 2016-05-02.
  3. "Midnight's Furies: The Deadly Legacy Of India's Partition". apps.npr.org. Retrieved 7 November 2020.
  4. "Seattle Times' critics best books of 2015". The Seattle Times. 4 December 2015. Retrieved 7 November 2020.
  5. Staff, Quartz. "The eye-opening things that made us smarter in 2015". Quartz. Retrieved 7 November 2020.
  6. "Midnight's Furies: The Deadly Legacy of India's Partition". www.amazon.com. Retrieved 7 November 2020.
  7. "The Best Nonfiction of 2015" . Retrieved 7 November 2020.
  8. Carter, Maxwell (2015-06-30). "The Most Deadly Summer". Wall Street Journal. ISSN   0099-9660 . Retrieved 2016-05-02.
  9. Observer, The (2015-07-12). "Best holiday reads 2015". The Guardian. ISSN   0261-3077 . Retrieved 2016-05-02.
  10. Bazaar, The American (2016-02-01). "Nisid Hajari wins 2016 William E. Colby Award for 'Midnight's Furies: The Deadly Legacy of India's Partition' - Arts & Books, Top Stories". The American Bazaar. Retrieved 2016-05-02.
  11. Tata.com. "Tata Literature Live! The Mumbai LitFest announces shortlists for five coveted book awards via @tatacompanies". www.tata.com. Retrieved 2016-05-02.