A time capsule, a desperate plea

The demolition of the Babri mosque in December 1992 by a frenzied Hindutva mob, amid the full glare of the State, stamped a fractured political identity on the Indian nation. It was no longer possible for the progressive segments to ignore the growing social presence of a disturbing Hindu-Muslim binary. Making place among the noticeable Hindi literature in the aftermath was Geetanjali Shree’s novel ‘Mera Shahar Us Baras’ (1998), matching in content, style and language the dilemma of the stereotypical responses in the inevitable churning. It was received as a masterpiece in the literary circles.

‘Our City, That Year’ is the English translation of ‘Mera Shahar Us Baras’ by the renowned Daisy Rockwell, who had earlier brilliantly combined with Geetanjali to win the International Booker Prize 2022 for the writer’s much later novel ‘Tomb of Sand’ (‘Ret Samadhi’, 2018).

Rockwell has described the present work as “Geetanjali’s most straightforwardly political novel”. True, the politics of communal propaganda and its lasting consequences on a nation’s psyche are belligerently mirrored in the novel.

“A looming silence grips the public.” That is how the blurb captures the all-pervasive communal backdrop in the tense story around which the main characters — Shruti, a writer, academics Sharad and Hanif, and an unyielding Daddu, Sharad’s father — manoeuver their individual voices. Terming the novel a time capsule, a warning siren and a desperate plea, the blurb concludes: “Readers will find themselves haunted long after the final page, grappling with questions that echo far beyond India’s borders.” The answers may not have been tuned in harmoniously, but the gripping resonance in the narration cannot be missed.

Geetanjali, herself an acknowledged scholar on Premchand, occasionally borrows the novel’s stereotypes from the great fiction writer. Sharad is reminiscing about rehearsing, in his childhood, for a dramatic adaptation of Premchand’s famous short story ‘Eidgah’, “but none among us could bring ourselves to say ‘Allahu Akbar’.” “You,” Sharad tells Hanif, “should stop taking the shortcut to the department along the drains.” Hanif looks angry at this pointed ‘you’. Earlier, Hanif had weighed in a typical Hindu-Muslim narrative in terms of human dignity: “The problem is with trying to dress it up as fiction…”

The novel searches for a rare blend of cultural construction and historical deconstruction in the characters living and transforming the stereotype, as also escaping from it. “Sometimes, when you speak of one, you mean the whole community, and when you speak of the whole community, you are talking about only the one. This is unity in diversity!” And then there is Hanif’s reflection upon dying in the riot: “And nothing will be attained by such a death, not martyrdom, not a certificate for bravery. It won’t prove the success of any campaign. It’ll actually be an utterly petty, insignificant death, useless, futile.”

An elderly Hindu mahant has been killed in the ashram. Someone has fired a shot during the morning puja. “Why does it make a difference whether it’s a bullet or a bomb? Ah, but they are one hundred per cent different: one is Hindu, the other Muslim!”

In her Translator’s Note, Rockwell writes: “In many ways, the writing (of ‘Our City, That Year’) is simpler and more straightforward than the maximalist experimentation of ‘Tomb of Sand’... and yet, the deeper I travelled into the text, the more apparent it became to me that that simplicity was deceptive....”

Sartre is quoted to have once said that the contemporary writer must write through his intimations of unease while trying to elucidate these. Sartre was fine with style: “Many young people today do not concern themselves with style. They think that what one says should be said simply, and that is all. For me, style — which does not exclude simplicity, quite the opposite — is above all a way of saying three or four things in one. There is the simple sentence, with its immediate meaning, and then at the same time, below this immediate meaning, other meanings are organised. If one is not capable of giving language this plurality of meaning, then it is not worth the trouble to write.”

‘Our City, That Year’ was Geetanjali’s second novel; ‘Tomb of Sand’ was her fifth. In between, she had two decades to mature as a writer. I remember having discussed with her some 20 years back what I thought was an occasional disconnect with her text as encountered by an average Hindi reader. She had smiled then, perhaps conveying a hidden foresight. Now, having seen the nationally-celebrated construction of the Ram Mandir at the very site of the demolished Babri mosque, and after going through this nuanced translation of the novel, I can contextualise her smile even deeper.