Lionel Lumb’s Midnight’s Exiles: Echoes of a Troubled Era

In his beautiful, sprawling, and ambitious historical fiction novel Midnight’s Exiles, author Lionel Lumb tells the story of the Dunns, an extended family of Anglo-Indians as they navigate the partition of India in 1947.

In addition to the elder Harry Dunn and his semi-estranged wife Elizabeth Farquhar Dunn, there are four sons — one in the family business, others in the Indian civil service, the police, and the army. They are among a prosperous minority chosen by the British to serve in their colonial enterprise. They have spacious homes, cooks, cleaners, drivers, and other servants. They live pleasant and busy social lives but are never accepted as equals by their British masters who enforce a rigid class system.

Lumb is also an Anglo- Indian, born in 1937 and raised in pre-partition Lahore. He does an admirable job of recreating the tantalizing tastes, sights, smells and sounds of that era.

Dark clouds on the horizon

Despite their prosperous and comfortable lives, there are dark clouds on the horizon for the Dunns. The Second World War is raging. The Japanese are in Burma and threatening the Indian sub-continent. The suitor of a young Dunn woman, a young British pilot, is making bombing runs to Burma. One of the Dunn family sons is a tank commander in that conflict.

Indians are pushing for self-rule, but the country is riven by historic ethnic and religious cleavages among Hindus, Sikhs, and Muslims. When partition occurs in 1947, an angry mob attacks and sets fire to the home of the Dunn’s Hindu neighbours. The Dunn’s compromise their own safety by offering a haven. That is only the beginning of their trials.

Lumb succeeds at fiction

Lumb was a print journalist in India and England before becoming a television producer and documentarist for the BBC. He moved to Canada in 1973 and worked for all the major television networks. He is among those rare journalists who succeed at writing fiction. He presents a riveting portrayal of the violence and ethnic cleansing that accompanied partition into the states of India and Pakistan.  

After his career in journalism, Lumb became a professor of journalism at Carleton University in Ottawa. He  taught me in that program, and was also the faculty advisor for my thesis, which was a made-for-television documentary. We became friends and we remain so.

Longing for a sequel

I know from this familiarity that Lumb has been incubating this novel for much of his adult life. Even while completing television documentaries and overseeing newsrooms, he was privately consumed by this story.

I long for a sequel, or a television mini-series. I want to know in more detail, and over a longer time, what happened to members of the Dunn family, their friends, colleagues, and lovers after their lives were thrown into disarray by the tragedy that accompanied partition.