Review: Stories about being Muslim in contemporary India

My review of Tabish Khair's latest collection, Namaste Trump and Other Stories: 

The book’s structure is imaginative, if also unusual. While its contents can be described as split into two broad sections–the novella Night of Happiness, which was published as a standalone in India in 2018, and a set of short stories–it would not be wise to read the novella as distinct from the stories. In fact, it is impossible to read each story as a self-contained whole to the extent that the same characters re-appear in more than one story; the narrative appears to pick up where it had been left off, with a different story inserted in between. 

Why has the author chosen this unusual approach instead of simply writing two or three novellas, and what should we read into the placement of the pieces? To me, it appears that Khair is nudging the reader to look beyond the events of individual stories, to seek out patterns, and to pay attention to the movements of time and shifts of location that the characters undergo. Some characters are semi-rural while others are firmly urban but all are strung together on the twin threads of Phansa, a small town in Bihar, and the experience of being Muslim in contemporary India, be it as protagonist, victim or observer... The horror of violence – past, present or future – repeatedly manifests in these stories in the shape of a paranormal experience. The sympathetic narrator of Night of Happiness must contend with an invisible halwa that leads him to feel “a bony hand” clutching at his heart. 

The titular story, “Namaste Trump” reveals the banal cruelty of a cynical upper-class executive who turns out a domestic worker during the COVID-19 pandemic, an act that has spiritual consequences. “Shadow of a Story” is a proper ghost story where Khair is in his element as a writer of fiction working in academia. Its narrator is a man who takes literature seriously and is able to reconsider positions taken in the context of literary criticism, and reassess his own valourisation of a particular postcolonial aesthetic after an encounter with brute violence in Phansa. Truth appears as a frightening presence in “The Thing with Feathers.” A personal favourite, this is a story about the unravelling of a teacher, Rakesh Sir, who “did things properly, always within limits” but who loses control of his tongue, and thus inadvertently becomes dangerous. The author once again drives us to a junction of reason where the evidence provided by one’s physical senses and simple common sense collides with an intangible, unbelievable world where the rules of our world no longer hold good. 

Through these Phansa-connected stories and their chaotic or uncanny outcomes, Khair reveals to us a landscape where petty cruelty is interlaced with looming threats of violence or destitution, and also with a quiet courage that approaches madness. It is a landscape filled with memorable characters that the reader can carry into, or far beyond, the towns and villages of their own origin. 

Read the full review in Frontline magazine: https://frontline.thehindu.com/books/book-review-namaste-trump-and-other-stories-tabish-khair-confronts-experience-of-being-muslim-in-contemporary-india/article67729914.ece

Book alert!

Bantering with Bandits and Other True Tales (Aleph 2023) is just out. This is a new edition of Known Turf (2010), with a fresh Introduction chapter and a lot of footnotes that update the book's information with newer data, which lend it fresh context. 

This book of essays was nominated for the Crossword book prize in the non-fiction category when it first came out, and had a bunch of mostly good reviews when it first came out. It attempts to tell the story of our country in our times, with brief dips and detours into banditry, caste crimes, gender violence, displacement, hunger and malnourishment, faith and identity. All of these are, as I have learnt over the years, interlinked processes. I urge you to buy and read the book. 

Review links from 2010: 

"Annie Zaidi’s collection of essays, Known Turf, is arresting and unforgettable; about realities we prefer didn’t exist. Starvation deaths, female infanticide and communal intolerance step out of the anonymity of statistics to become people like us. They remind us of our defence mechanisms in the face of horror and sorrow; our efforts to stay sane and functional" - Karthika Nair in Tehelka

"Known Turf is a wonderfully engaging example of a puzzling trend in contemporary Indian writing in English. Despite the hype surrounding the novels-with-large-advances, the best writing today is happening in non-fiction." Alok Rai in Outlook

"Tragic and tender and brutal and funny." Known Turf covers a lot of turf.

"At its best, the book combines a reporter’s on-the-spot perception and a writer’s reflection and language to etch interesting, nuanced portraits of that half-mythical being in the throes of constant change: contemporary India. Known Turf is definitely worth reading, and not just for the sake of Gabbar Singh." Tabish Khair in Mint

"...anyone who has braved the railways without a confirmed reservation will get cathartic pleasure reading Zaidi’s graphic account of sitting on the corner of a seat, at a 45 degrees angle, with an RAC (Reservation against cancellation) ticket in a train to Lucknow" Alpana Chowdhury in DNA

"A book like this, written by someone who may once have been just as sheltered as they were, will resonate with Generation iPad in a way that a more world-weary account would bypass entirely." Manjula Padmanabhan in Outlook Traveller

"It’s a rare look into the lives of dacoits minus caricature.  Zaidi’s writing attempts to evoke an understanding of their reality." The Reporter and her Beat in Civil Society

"Among all the issues that Zaidi touches on, I find molestation to be the most moving. Though she puts in a lot of information on the other subjects she chooses, the whole force of her personality comes into play only when she starts speaking of molestation and eve teasing." From here

More reviews here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Sad Stories You are Old Enough to Hear

Eight years ago, I had my first essay accepted in the Griffith Review. 'Embodying Venus' was a meditation on women's bodies and (un)covering and the politics around it. There were a few more pieces in the journal since: 'Golden Girls' about the rise of young female wrestlers in India, 'Dangerous Little Things' about the significance of student politics, and a short story about ideological wars on Twitter, 'Cows Come Home'.

This year, again, I have a piece in their newest edition, Creation Stories. It is written in the form of a letter to a beloved young person who is growing up in fraught times: Sad Stories You are Old Enough to Hear

Dear A, 

The other day, I told you to stay out of it when two adults were talking about something serious. I saw your face, startled perhaps that this should come from me. I regretted it at once, partly because you are not a child. You are what we call ‘young adult’ in the world of literary endeavour and a young adult must be allowed into adult conversations. I know that my concerns may not be yours and perhaps even your sense of identity is not the same as mine. Perhaps you will be content to define yourself through pronouns or talent and no other struggle will be necessary. Still, we share blood, history and a love of stories, and I want to tell you some true stories today. Destabilising stories that offer neither resolution nor catharsis. Stories that go on, like an underground railroad loop inside your head. Stories that may explain the prickly, fragmented being you sometimes catch a glimpse of, before I clumsily gather myself. You will not remember it, but there’s a fragment of me permanently embedded on a railway platform in Mumbai...

The whole piece is behind a paywall but do read it here: https://www.griffithreview.com/articles/sad-stories-you-are-old-enough-to-hear/?fbclid=IwAR2xV0B2_KcjkLdCvNQH2TT9yRNNS697-_Slrq2GwCd43R5RKtlTFlC64hI 

A review of Moyukh Chatterjee’s Composing Violence: The Limits of Exposure and the Making of Minorities

If a government is driven by the need to secure majority mandates, what incentives does it have to secure minority rights? In fact, if all institutions are ultimately answerable to majoritarian sentiments, if the creation of an unyielding majority is a constant political necessity, it stands to reason that the re-creation of minorities is also essential. Moyukh Chatterjee’s Composing Violence: The Limits of Exposure and the Making of Minorities addresses this question in direct and rather unsettling ways...

He argues that violence against minorities is not an exceptional event in the Global South, that it is essentially political violence – garbed as religious or ethnic violence – used to construct more or less permanent majorities and minorities. While this book focuses on India, it reminds us that modern Western states like the US and Canada were built on ‘the expulsion and subjugation of Indigenous and Black people’ and that contemporary violence against such racial minorities is ‘not a deviation from modernity but an integral aspect of the making of the modern nation-state itself.’ There is something foundational about antiminority violence and as postcolonial countries have developed into modern democracies, their respective pogroms and ethnic ‘conflicts’ have served to establish dominant racial or religious majorities as stable political majorities. 

Posing the question – ‘What can India tell us about the power of public violence against minorities to act as a catalyst for the creation of a permanent majority?’ – the author attempts to answer it through this book. His title – composing violence – is an attempt to understand ‘how violence persists, motivates, and animates social and political life beyond the scene of horror,’ and to move away from the idea that violence is ‘a breakdown, interruption, and exception,’ to instead describe it as ‘a constitutive force.’ This transformational quality of violence serves as a catalyst for turning Muslims in India into permanent minorities and ‘outsiders’. 

Read the full review here: https://thewire.in/books/book-review-majoritiarian-violence-moyak-chatterjee

 

A review of 'In Your Tongue, I cannot Fit'

This is a difficult book to review in that it does not adhere to any literary format. It includes poetry, but it is not an anthology. It includes art, but it is not an art book. Broadly, the book serves as a document and a testament, a creative intervention on a continuum of silencing. In the photographs of the art installation, where poems were printed and placed on spikes, it is impossible to escape the mental image of heads of rebels placed on pikes though there is no blood in sight. Describing his first reaction to the exhibit, Tripathi says that the “arrogant spikes” appeared as flagpoles and the sheets of paper as white flags. The microphones, he writes, were not meant to be spoken into. Instead, the artist placed speakers in the microphones to amplify the poets’ words.

Gupta’s artwork also includes silhouettes traced from photographs of poets and activists who were arrested or have simply disappeared, and other objects associated with the denial of freedom. In an interview with Tina Marie Monelyon, Gupta says, “Power likes freedom and certainty for itself and not for others,” and goes on to make a connection between those who were killed and those who are viciously trolled online. The intent is the same—to ridicule, to harass, and to distract and confuse all others who might otherwise have been inclined to listen and think. However, as the editors point out in their introduction: “Empires have risen and fallen and national boundaries have changed. But the words of poets have survived.”

Full review here:

https://frontline.thehindu.com/books/crycrycrycry-book-review-for-in-your-tongue-i-cannot-fit-encounters-with-prison-edited-by-shilpa-gupta-salil-tripathi/article66368374.ece

On coverings of face or head, and the cultural value of uniformity

A good school or college teaches students to see people for the good or harm they do rather than focus on their skin, surnames, hair or tiffin-boxes. No society can hope to emerge from the dark pit of ignorance if it refuses to allow experiments with appearance, habits, even cultural values. What is ignorance, after all, but not knowing? Knowledge comes from seeing, listening, recognising, interpreting. A mulish refusal to allow difference is rooted in an irrational fear of knowledge. If uniform rules lead to the denial of education, the best academic response is to discuss the role of uniformity as a cultural value.

That schools and colleges should refuse to accept a covered head is distressing. Even more distressing is their argument broken down: you are only acceptable if you show exactly as much skin or hair as we demand. This is as good as saying: you have no right to govern your own body. This is a dangerous idea to put into any institution, private or public, and especially dangerous for women if endorsed by the state and courts of law.

Those who use the ‘uniform’ argument to keep Muslims out of educational institutions have struck a double blow. The first blow lands on the rights of Muslim students while the second lands upon the hearts of Hindu students whose capacity for critical thought and solidarity is being squeeze-shrunk out of them. They are being taught that it is okay to reject someone based on their appearance, that it is okay to bully or hate those who are different. Worse, it pushes forward the idea that cultural identities are fixed and citizens have no right to multiple or overlapping identities.

There have been some mal-intentioned arguments on social media, based on pictures of girls with and without the hijab, seeming to make the argument that if a girl can show her hair in one location, among one set of people, she has no right to cover herself in another location. The dangers of this argument are so great, and so obvious, that I am amazed at how little pushback there has been from women’s groups across the country.

Some thoughts triggered by hostile reactions to masks and to hijabs in recent weeks. Read the full article here: 

https://www.thehindu.com/society/no-society-can-hope-to-emerge-from-ignorance-if-it-refuses-to-allow-experiments-with-appearance-habits-cultural-values/article65189727.ece

The heart of the republic

Freedom is not simply a matter of being fed. The technical lack of a cage also does not define freedom. She may be trained to perform on stage through a judicious mix of fear, pain and food, but a lioness balancing on a chair and being ridden by a clown cannot be called free.

Hunting and killing also do not necessarily translate to freedom. A lioness must also be free to not hunt and not kill when she chooses. One who is expected to tear into a gladiator, or an unarmed Christian convert, is no freer than the human she will kill.

Freedom, then, is a form of self-determination. Being able to make one’s own choices is vital to the process of achieving it, and inhabiting it. And what is the republic if not a human attempt towards self-determination?

Some thoughts on the republic, freedom and Born Free today in the Indian Express: 

https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/freedom-is-the-heart-of-a-republic-7741660/

 

Some more thoughts on freedom

Squeeze your lids over your irises, until the inner mirror fogs over, and say the word ‘freedom’. What image do you see?

I see a keen blue and bale upon bale of cottony white sky. Freedom to me is an unbroken expanse, full of light, full of beauty and unlimited potential. Like the sky, it is unfailingly present. Like the sky, it is simultaneously universal and particular, and forever in need of watching. It changes each hour of each day, and my slice of sky can grow black and thunderous even as it remains blue for another citizen in another town. Yet, the sky is comprised of the same materials everywhere.

What of freedom: what is it made of? 

In an article about the dangers of a philanthropy-centric approach to pressing problems rather than a rights-based one, political philosopher Gwilym David Blunt had posed an interesting question: ‘Let’s say a kindly benefactor offered you a better standard of living than that which you currently enjoy, or can realistically aspire to, and credibly promises to treat you very well. The only condition is that they would own you. Would you accept the offer?’

I know I would not. And yet, why? What is it about this word — freedom — that I am willing to pay for it with my life? Why did our ancestors pay the ultimate price? Thousands were executed in 1857 and in the 90 years that followed, tens of thousands lost precious years of youth and health as they were jailed, exiled, stripped of their properties. The word gulaam, slave, was used to describe the status of India before we won Independence in 1947. It is a question still worth asking: what made us feel enslaved?

Some thoughts on what comprises freedom in this new essay in The Hindu: 

Hand on heart, is we truly free?