The terror of being a poor Muslim in India

Jimmy the terrorist by Omair Ahmad
Hamish Hamilton, 2010; Rs. 350

Reviewed by Zafar Anjum

Novelist Omair Ahmad has chosen a misleading title for his third work of fiction, Jimmy the Terrorist. Jimmy, a lovingly anglicized version of Jamaal, is not an Islamist terrorist, plotting revenge in a post 9/11 world. As such, Jimmy the Terrorist is not about Islamist terrorism. It is about the terror of being a Muslim in India.

Well, make that a ‘poor’ Muslim in India. Omair brings up the class issue in his narrative, so the main protagonist Jamaal’s being ‘poor’ is quite pertinent here and must be taken note of. And Jamaal’s poverty is not the typical kind of poverty associated with the majority of Muslims and low caste Indians. His father is a teacher, he has a roof over his head, he studies at Moazzamabad’s most venerable school, St. Jude’s—only he doesn’t have the kind of expensive shoes and shirts and pocket money that his other ‘Hindu’ classmates have. Jamaal is ‘that’ kind of poor. He is middle-class poor—that’s where young Indian Muslim terrorists purportedly come from. The category of lower class Muslims—the ones who live in slums—is the fount of gangsters in India, the type you see in Bollywood films.

When the novel begins with a geographical and historical map-making of Moazzamabad in Uttar Pradesh, a certain kind of expectation builds up. Maybe it is because of the kind of news we have been receiving in the last few years—the stories of Indian police branding innocent young Muslim boys as terrorists and killing them for awards and trophies. When Omair evokes Moazzamabad and Rasoolpur, we hope to read about a sample biography of one of the terrorist boys from Azamgarh. I thought Jimmy the Terrorist would do for fiction what Tehelka does for non-fiction in India. At the same time, I was worried that the novelist would do what he is not supposed to do—bringing the news.

I was wrong.

Omair exceeds my expectations. He goes into India’s heart of darkness (actually he comes from there) and returns with a tale that reflects the reality of Indian Muslims today. His tale is ordinary, even deceptively simple in its plotting and narration but in its bosom is the picture of India’s underbelly and how it perceives its existence in a climate of Hinduvta-based politics.

The story is so plain that if I were a neocon reviewer, drawing a fat salary from one of the American think-tanks, I would have dismissed the book in a few sentences. Why make a fuss over a dead Muslim boy in a god-forsaken small town in Uttar Pradesh? Look at the numbers in Afghanistan and Iraq. Hundreds of thousands of Muslims have died. And wait! The number of deaths would be even more spectacular after the folly of revolutions in the Middle East. So, why care about Jimmy—I would have said.

Yet, the story Omair wants to share with us is important. And he does it with a simplicity which is hard to achieve, especially in setting up a story in the backdrop of India’s communal politics. Omair pulls the challenge off with ease and dexterity. Through his two main characters, Rafiq and his son Jamaal, the novelist brings into sharp relief the Muslim alienation in India today that has developed over two generations since Independence. The older protagonist, Rafiq, becomes an angry demagogue; the younger one, Jimmy, does not speak; he stores his anger until it explodes in a violent climax. Unlike his father, he lacks the safety valve of hate speech.

Omair shows that his two characters haven’t chosen their attitudes. Their circumstances have turned them into who they are. The story is precisely about this transformation in their nature. And the understanding of that mechanism that Omair brings to his reader is his main achievement in this novel.

When Rafiq, who aspired to be a poet and wanted acceptance in a local poetry circle, loses everything he so painstakingly has built over the years, he is forced to take a job at an Islamic school. Formerly a geography lecturer in a college, he is not sure how to go about his job interview. One of his friends teaches him the trick to land the job:

“Just be angry,” Haris said. “Rant and rave. Talk about the grand tragedies, about oppression, zulm, riots and murder. Grow your beard a little longer and miss no opportunity to raise your voice against the suffering of Muslims. It’s what the Mullahs do all the time.”

This cultivated anger gives Rafiq a sort of power that he never had and he carries this trick wherever he goes, to great success.

Jamaal, Rafiq’s son, on the other hand, grows pensive and inward-looking at St. Jude’s. “Being a winner requires more than just being first in a race: a victory is never quite that unless there are people who will acknowledge your triumph. It was the reason Jamaal never stood first in any of his exams.” At school, Jamaal also learns that there is a price to success, and the price isn’t simply hard work.

In the novel, Omair mentions many things: partition, communal riots, Sanjay Gandhi’s nasbandi programme, demolition of Babri Masjid and Advani’s Rath Yatra. But not once does he mention Pakistan. This omission is strange; or maybe it is a welcome relief for many Indian readers. But I wonder if the protagonists ever imagine what their fate would have been in Pakistan. Would they have fared better there?

Since Omair’s Jimmy the Terrorist has emerged out of a set of short stories, the seams have marked the narrative. More than half way through the book, one protagonist fades off and another protagonist takes over. If the story is about Jimmy, tell us Jimmy’s story—some readers might feel that way.

Even though the narrator’s voice in the novel is warm and mellifluous, it sometimes tires you. That is the other problem with the novel. Omair’s tendency to overexplain things slows down the narrative.

Jimmy the Terrorist is no Booker Prize material (here I humbly disagree with the novel’s publisher who had thought that it was Booker prize material)—it does not have the level of complexity and technical finesse of a great work of fiction but given the fact that the Chetan Bhagats are ruling the roost in India, it is encouraging to see young writers like Omair Ahmad trying their hand at serious fiction. Jimmy the Terrorist should be applauded for that daring itself.

This review was written in March and a version of it appeared in Indian Literature (published by Sahitya Akademi, New Delhi) in August 2011.

Riddle of the Seventh Stone

We like ambition in people. In India, children at a very young age are often asked by doting relatives what they want to become when they grow up: a doctor, an engineer, a lawyer, a scientist, a pilot, or a business executive. Indian parents take great pride in showing off the precociousness of their offsprings when they are able to set an ambition for themselves and rattle it out with an impressive perspicacity in front of their relatives at weddings or dinner parties.

Recently, at a business lunch, a young Indian lady proudly said how her eight year old son knew exactly what he wanted to do in life. Between the lifting of forks and stirring of spoons, a contrast was drawn to the older generation of Indians who wasted almost half a lifetime in figuring out what they wanted to do with their lives and where they wanted to go (in Naipaul’s words, the clever ones went to the US and UK “to make cookies and shovel snow off the pavement in winter—and educate their children”). This attitudinal change, between the older generation and the new crop of Indians, is taken as a sign of India’s progress towards modernity.

The ambition of a person defines him. If it is quixotic, it becomes a source of entertainment for his friends and relatives. While they would cheer on Don Quixote in the pursuit of the nearly impossible ambition, they would snigger in the sleeves, waiting for the moment when Quixote puts his feet on a banana peel. When Quixote reaches within the striking distance of achieving success, their cheering would turn into a skeptical form of disapproval: ‘Is the goal worth all the trouble? Why is he even doing this?’ and so on. Once he enters the portal of success and steps into the hall of fame, the success would be conspiratorially begrudged and daggers of jealousy would come out in the open. That is more or less the trajectory of a person with an literary goal in India unless you happen to have gone to Oxford or Stanford, or at least, to Delhi’s St. Stephen’s College.

When I first came to know Monideepa Sahu through Francis Ford Coppola’ forum for writers, Zoetrope, she was a former banker looking for a future in writing. We soon became friends and exchanged emails (we still do), supporting each other in our literary journeys. Unlike me, Monideepa had gone to Delhi University’s Lady Shri Ram College and had studied literature. She displayed a good grasp of literature and had a sharp eye for nuanced writing. I always valued her feedback and suggestions and earned a friend in the process.

Over the years, Monideepa grew as a writer and had success with some stories published in journals outside India. More success followed with her stories getting into anthologies in India and Malaysia. When her novel was picked up by Zubaan, out of an open pitch competition at Kala Ghoda Festival in Mumbai, I was as genuinely excited as her. In the following months, I got to read some chapters of the novel and when the illustrations for the book were ready, she sent them to me for my feedback. When the book came out, I was sent a copy. Yet, out of her natural grace and goodness, Monideepa never asked me to review her book (I rarely review books for others). I took it upon myself to write a review of her novel voluntarily.

What I said about ambition and jealousy springing forth out of success with one’s ambition does not apply in Monideepa’s case. She deserves all the success that she has got and deserves more. Given the odds in her life, which I have been somewhat privy to, her achievement is praiseworthy. In this whole journey, from writerly frustration to success, I have never felt even a tiny tinge of jealousy or nurtured a speck of ill-will toward her. I am sure she will achieve more success with many books that she plans to write.

I don’t have much experience in reading or reviewing literature for children in English (except for the classics that I read in school, from Panchtantra to Aesope’s fables and Arabian Nights and so on). I didn’t know how to start this review (I hate false starts) so I thought a note on our literary friendship would be an apt beginning.

Also, the topic of ambition and ill-will seems pertinent in the discussion of her first novel, Riddle of the Seventh Stone. Rishabh the rat, the novel’s protagonist, magically metamorphoses into a human form and enters the realm of Indian childhood. In this new world, he has a similarly transformed spider companion Shashee, and human friends, Deepak and Leela and their grandparents. While Rishabh grapples with tough geometry lessons in school, he grows up to like the new world and solve its problems; he is also given the ambition to become a doctor. The character of an Indian child without acquiring an ambition would be like a fable without a moral lesson—a universally important element of literature for children or young adults.

The ill-will part, the menace in the story, comes from a property developer, the Shark, who, just like one of the thieves in Home Alone, has glinting titanium teeth. Monideepa sets up the conflict early on in the story. The Shark wants to takeover the shop of Deepak and Leela’s grandfather, Venkat, and turn it into a shopping mall. What follows, in terms of a plot, is a thriller-like account of how Rishabh thwarts the plans of the bad guy, and at the end of the tale, emerges as a winner. He discovers a treasure but his real prize is more than that, which comes with a moral lesson for all the characters in the novel.

Apart from its fascinating storyline and moral lessons (important achievements never come easily to anyone; We mustn’t allow sorrow and disappointment to darken our world, and so on), what drew me into the novel is Monideepa’s language. The narrator’s voice is adult-like, with a sharp eye for detail, and a playful display of a facility for describing tastes and senses (a gang of crickets playing Mozart’s symphonies, stale rotis stiffer than shoe uppers; dustbins overflowing with gourmet delights, and so on).

Monideepa evokes the city of Bangalore and its history and geography with a deceptive ease. But what I loved most in the novel is her use of metaphors and similes in the story which often comes from the point of a view of a vermin (a voice sweet as a carrot halwa, a girl’s eyes has been described as a pair of lovely burnt frying pans). She also shows interesting parallels between the human and the vermin world by using imaginative devices such as V-Mail (for Vermin Mail) and WWW (Wonderful Wide Web). What fun!

Monideepa’s first venture into the world of vermins and humans is a delightful read. If I as an adult couldn’t put down the novel, I am sure children and young adults would find it a most fascinating read.

Riddle of the Seventh Stone, by Monideepa Sahu, Delhi: Young Zubaan, 2010. The book can be ordered online from Flipkart, Indiaplaza, and Crossword within India.

The idea of artistic value is meaningless these days

So says novelist and critic Amit Chaudhuri. The context of his saying this is Bollywood and the kind of films it produces. I quote from a review of his latest release (a book of essays, Clearing a Space: reflections on India, literature and culture) in The Economist:

Pausing briefly, Mr Chaudhuri, the earnest poet, dismisses any possibility of Bollywood containing “artistic value”. And then the critic recollects himself, and Mr Chaudhuri reflects that, “of course”, the idea of artistic value is meaningless these days.

Here's on his take on Indian literature and postmodernism:

Post-modernism, writes Mr Chaudhuri, is “polyphony; the conflation and confusion of fantasy with history”, a “rhetoric of excess, plenty and a relentless engulfing inclusiveness”, which has been the context for Indian writers since the 1981 publication of Salman Rushdie’s babbling narrative, “Midnight’s Children”.

An exhausting theorist, Mr Chaudhuri likens this and the Indian literature that has followed it—with all its variety and interconnectedness—to globalisation. Literary merit, he says, has become synonymous with commercial value; “today’s writers are stocks and shares”. Here, the poet in Mr Chaudhuri asserts himself: “The triumphal narrative of Indian writing”—perhaps even including Mr Rushdie’s feted trickery—“bores me, personally speaking, as a reader and writer.”

Thought-provoking, isn't it?

This agent is more cool than James Bond

His motto is: Rob the publisher and enrich the writer.

Hmm...so many writers love him. And for the aspiring writers, he is the god of many big things.

He is the one who got the spunky Arundhati Roy's first book out and created a publishing sensation.

He is David Godwin, the legendary lit agent, the literay Robin Hood, as this Mint article describes him.

But apparently, he started small. When he got Roy in his stable of writers, he says he just had a table and chair in his office and nothing else. He took the next flight out to India to meet her and sign her up (perhaps, worried, had she seen him in his lacklustre office, she might have changed her mind):

After he was fired by Aitken in 1995, Godwin decided to set up an eponymous agency with his wife, Heather, looking after the business side. A friend who was a shipping agent offered him a desk and a phone at his office. “I was in my early 40s. I had no money. No salary. I had to live off what I had sold,” recalls Godwin.

Then everything changed. Godwin’s friend Patrick French (who would go on to write Liberty or Death) dropped by. “Patrick told me that Pankaj Mishra (then working for HarperCollins) had told him about a manuscript he had come across which was ‘the biggest thing since Midnight’s Children’,” says Godwin. It was written by a woman nobody had heard of. Her name was Arundhati Roy.

The manuscript arrived the same day. Later that night, half-way through The God of Small Things, Godwin made a call across the world. He loved the book, he told Roy. He was taking the first flight out to meet her.

A bemused Roy told Godwin to calm down, finish the manuscript and then call her back, if he was still interested.

Two days later, Godwin was flying out to a country he had never before visited—an event that has become so much a part of the folklore surrounding The God of Small Things that it is sometimes referred to simply as the “dash”.

But Godwin is less romantic about that dash and says with a sense of pragmatism: “I only had a desk in London. I thought it would be better for me to see her in India.”

There are two new things here, at least for me. I had read that Pankaj Mishra himself had called up Godwin. Turns out no, not him, it was through Patrick French that Godwin came to know of Roy's manuscript. Also, what is intriguing is that if the book was so good, and it was as time would prove, why didn't Pankaj buy it for Harper Collins for whom he was working at that time (am I right?).

"It was written by a woman nobody had heard of. Her name was Arundhati Roy." Well, I had heard of her. In fact, I had read one of her pieces, in the then Vir Shanghvi edited mag, SUNDAY. She had written protesting against Shekhar Kapur making a film on the life of India's bandit queen. The lady was always a fighter, and courted controversy right from the beginnning. I hope I am not getting the timeline wrong here.

Brand India's soft power of literature

Siddhartha Deb on India's soft power of literature. Read the intro of his piece; the history described there should not be forgotten:

The relationship between Indian writers and western publishers has been in many ways a necessary collaboration, and one that does not always take the form of accepting big advances from multinational conglomerates: for instance, Arundhati Roy, in spite of the bestseller status of her novel, The God of Small Things, has published most of her essay collections with the smallest of American publishers, the radical Cambridge-based South End Press. But publication in the west has also produced a kind of dual identity for the Indian writer in English. If successful in the west, especially in the amount of noise made by the publicity machine, the Indian writer is understood to be part of Brand India, using the "soft power" of literature to consolidate the more muscular geopolitical reach of the state. Some writers play along with this, performing the role of the native informant with ease. But for others, and I believe this is what makes them attractive to publishers and readers in the west, writing is shaped by their sense of literature as an engaged art, one that interprets the world as an imperfect, unfinished place rather than one where a universal system has laid down the perfect, eternal gridwork of inequality.

I don't think, by any means, that it is only Indian writers who are working in this manner, or that they have some sort of special dispensation to do so, but they seem to have the advantage (and the drawback) of using English, at a historical moment when the west has turned its attention on India and China. It is a crossroads that offers very different alternatives to Indian writers: that of cashing it in by becoming minor entertainers for the powerful and the privileged, or that of looking for new forms and new ways of engagement with the stories that demand to be told. The upheaval we are caught up in is so vast, and so uncertain - is this the best of times? the worst? - that Indian writing has barely begun to take the measure of the conditions in which it functions.