Looking Through Glass

When my father and uncle ask me for books to read I know what it is
they are looking for. Their subject, I'm implying ownership, is the
40's, the era that culminates in Partition and Independence. Whereas I
would like to recommend postcolonial fiction for their fix they are
looking for histories and the works of political scientists. In the
middle of these generational fault-lines, at a time when their
interests are at a peak (1997 being the 50th anniversary of it all)
has come a godsend that marries their subject with my favored literary
form.

The novel, "Looking Through Glass", set smack dab in the middle of my
favorite buzurgs' favorite decade, involves their point-of-view:
refreshing revisionist ideas of the Cabinet Mission Plan, of Congress,
and Nehru and Jinnah, and mine: wonderful stories spun from alterist
points of view.

"UP is generally regarded as the heartland of 'Muslim Separatism' and
the storm center of the movement towards Partition. Yet, secondary
literature on such themes is pathetically inadequate," so says
historian Mushirul Hasan of Jamia Millia Islamia Delhi. "We await the
publication of Mukul Kesavan's M.Lit thesis written at the University
of Cambridge." Mukul Kesavan's thesis is not published but he has a
produced a novel that sheds wonderful light on the heartland issue of
Muslim separatism.

The novel has an intriguing hook in its choice of the narrative voice:
a twenty-something Delhi missionary school product of the 80's. His
profession, photography, and his immediate family's suburban life are
simply the latest facts of his life leading him away from the heart of
the old city, and from history. His Dadi, however has neither
abandoned the city nor the past. She continues to live at Kashmiri Gate
and isn't at peace with the memory of her commitment to Gandhi's Quit
India Movement of 1942.

Our hero's visits to his Dadi at her Kashmeri Gate house have
principally to do with her wrinkles as photography subject. And then
one day he steps, Alice-like, through the looking glass and finds
himself in the wonderland of her era.

I won't spoil the story of his path through the looking glass, suffice
to say he has an accident, loses consciousness and wakes up to find
himself rescued by a Muslim family of Lucknow. He finds no way out of
the past. "Stuck, like the rest of us, in a time and place not of his
choosing he does the usual things: he improvises a life and assembles
a world -one bound by love." (I couldn't help quoting this line from the
description in the jacket of the book though I can't credit its
anonymous writer!) His Lucknowi family is the only family he has. He
knows enough history to know that in '47 many Muslims will go to
Pakistan with Mr. Jinnah and that in Delhi many Muslims will be
killed. If he is to hold on to his newly found family he fears both
Pakistan -he is Hindu, and a potential family move to Delhi on the eve
of Partition.

Living as we are in the post "Midnight's Children" era of South Asian
writing, the back to the future magic of the novel did not catch my
eye. But it's not supposed to. The magical realism employed in the book
does not swagger. For reading South Asian history, dominantly written
for pedantic and establishment-pleasing purposes, heavily ironic fiction
has been welcome. The dazzle of writers like Shashi Tharoor (The Great
Indian Novel) and Vikram Chandra (Red Earth and Pouring Rain) has not
left lasting impressions. It's a relief when postcolonial wit and
hindsight is humane.

When the book ends at late 1947, the year of the holocaust of
Partition. Our hero spends the five years 42-47 on an odyssey that
takes him from Lucknowi coffee shops to wrestling houses of Banaras
and colonial enclaves of viceregal splendor at Delhi and Simla. Though
our protagonist has a ringside seat to the events of his time this is
no Gumpian journey though history. There is too much at stake.

Through our hero we live with the Lucknowi family that rescued
him. Ammi runs a quarterly for women from home for which she writes
all the articles. My khawateen will discover babies and recipes for
themselves, she declares. They need to live. To this end she mails
them travelogues written in the first person, lives of women
travelling outside the zenana, all tales and characters inventions of
her own.

Inevitably, our hero gets embroiled in the family, as when a woman
introduced to the family on his account falls in love with Ammi's
daughter. And he gets entangled in the outside world. Serving a stint
as a waiter at the posh Cecil hotel in Delhi one night, he serves on
M.A Jinnah and, yes, pops the question: so you really want the country
partitioned?

A hint as to the answer: the Jinnah resurrected for the book is Ayesha
Jalal, not Stanley Wolpert's version. Our hero's exquisite encounter
with Jinnah implies political scientist Ayesha Jalal's challenge to
historiographical orthodoxy. In "The Sole Spokesman" she has argued for
Jinnah's role as barrister for the Muslim minority cause rather than
the traditionally understood role of Jinnah as Moses leading the
Muslims out of Egypt. Of course Mukul Kesavan's fiction is no heavy
political treatise, but deals with Partition with affection and
humor. It is the story of Partition as high camp, as opposed to stuffy
realism, and soft tragedy, as opposed to an indignant outcry.

Our protagonist's encounters with history are not gratuitous for
him. In the summer of '45 he has been transferred to the Cecil in
Simla where the Congress and the Muslim League are debating the future
of India as a federation. He is watching with the knowledge of my
generation. The knowledge of violence that is to be when federation
fails again and again in South Asia between in the time between '47
and my generation -Partition, East Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Punjab, Assam,
Kashmir, Baluchistan, Karachi.

But I am dwelling overly much on violence. There are many other
provocative subjects in the novel. There is the story of a conversion:
Ammi's husband was born into a Brahmin family. His father planned for
him the life Motilal Nehru planned for his son: missionary school, law
school, establishment of a law practice and a subsequent Nehruvian
ride into the sunset of imperial glory, and another ride out of the
sunrise of post-imperial glory. But Ammi's husband walks out on his
Nehruvian destiny by falling in love with Urdu poetry and then Ammi, a
Muslim girl.

There is the subject of Muslim disaffection with the Congress told
from a rare point of view. Seen through Ammi's son's eyes, a
nationalist activist, we are shown a Muslim unwelcome in the world of
Congress and the Quit India Movement and not the other way around.

The book would be worth the read if only for Ammi's election
campaign. She decides to run for a seat in '45, '46 elections, as an
independent, i.e neither Congress nor Muslim League. The name of her
party: Anjuman Bara-e-Tahafffuz-e-Haal (!) She is pissed off at
experienced old men like Nehru and Jinnah who, she says, want to sweep
their lives away and live like strangers in brand new countries.