Book Review | A beautiful slow-burn novel sums up the Indian Muslim’s passions

As India gets saffronised, and liberal writers lose space, a ‘resistance’ of sorts is brewing in English-language publishing. Mainstream trade publishing is the new home of the ‘underground’, as ironic as it might sound. Off late, we have seen a clutch of fiction and non-fiction books that attempt to come to terms with the revised order: Kunal Purohit’s H-Pop: The Secretive World of Hindutva Pop Stars, Akaar Patel’s After Messiah, Lindsay Pereira’s The Memoirs of Valmiki Rao and Ziya Us Salam’s Being Muslim in Hindu India, to mention a few. While these titles are welcome, they also give ballast to the other side, who can argue that the prognosis of India becoming a fascist society is rendered false just by the fact of these books being published.

Anjum Hasan’s beautiful slow-burn novel, containing a raft of sharply-etched characters both major and minor, runs a fine comb through India’s matted history, and engages to the very end with its Islamic past and present. History’s Angel is a Muslim novel. No, it’s a Muslim Delhi novel. It’s an almost-historical novel. It’s a contemporary novel. No, it’s a first-rate novel. Period.

I haven’t read any reviews but I’m sure it’s been called ‘prescient’ and ‘timely’, two words Indian reviewers have ground to cliché. I finished the book, then habitually deferred writing the review (bless my editor) – I’m glad I did so, for this is the kind of novel that takes time to sink in, and, when it settles at the bottom of the reader’s heart and mind, it’s for good. What this novel is after is the permanence of quality in a rebooted India, where the old certainties, both religious and secular, are fading faster than daylight in December. Hasan gets the minutiae of daily domestic life in a Muslim household (across generations, from Daryaganj to Mehrauli), as well as The Big Picture, stretching back centuries, while locating the narrative firmly in the restless transmuting present.

This is not an easy book to read, and, I imagine, couldn’t have been an easy one to write, what with the detailed observations of the insides of homes and the outsides of a city, mounds of historical research and multiple backstories. At its centre is Alif, not much of a believer, a middle-aged “middle-class nobody”, a “storm-tossed” history schoolteacher (he hates Civics) who “still does not quite feel at the centre of his story”, and the monologues and soliloquies running constantly in his head. Tahira, his wife, works as a store manager at a Karol Bagh supermarket – she’d rather be working in one in Saket or Gurugram - and is studying for an MBA. She can cook but won’t. They have a fourteen-year-old son, Salim, always “immersed in his labyrinthine laptop”. Standing in for the edgy hyper-religious Muslim is the help, Ahmed, “eternal duster tucked under his arm”, and who is not averse to throwing a hot iron at his wife when angry. Alif’s father, Mahtab, is a retired policeman, while his wife, Shagufta, a former lab technician, volunteers three times a week at the local health centre run by a madrasa. Alif’s drinking buddy is Ganesh, systems admin in an MNC and the son of his Hindu landlord. The turning point in the narrative comes early when Ankit, a nine-year-old student, calls Alif “a dirty Musalla”; Alif, “before he can parse this, finds his hand reaching out to Ankit’s ear...He twists it with moderate force.”

In the course of the novel, Hasan subjects everyone to critical scrutiny – Nehru, Gandhi, the Muslim League, the Khilafat movement. She dips into the what-ifs of history to illustrate the contingencies that brought us to where we are now. What does it mean to be a Muslim today? “Is this all we are?” asks Tahira, “Poetry-spouting fools with minced-mutton coming out of our ears, thinking only of Allah and pining only for bahshisht between mouthfuls of zafrani pulao?” Then there is the Indian Muslim of primetime TV debates: “Someone cuts in and says, ‘Why should Muslims -’But this line of questioning is not fated to find completion. ‘Madam,’ shouts a third someone, wagging his finger. ‘Muslims need to -’And then the anchor butts in, ‘But Muslims are...’”

In the crowded heart of Old Delhi, we see and hear things, or are they imagined figments? “A banner strung between electricity poles flaps in the breeze, asking the government to please leave Muslims alone.” Or: “a woman rushes past, a green flag tied around her shoulders, shouting Babri Zindabad”.

Hasan is brilliant at physical description; she has a word for everything she describes:  “the aluminium slatwall panels from which shoes hung”. The prose is leavened by unexpected humour – When Alif texts Tahira that he’s passing by the Supreme Court, she responds: “I wouldn’t want to live there, I’d have to walk hours just to get a potato.” The reader comes away a more literate person: did you know that just a hundred and fifty years ago, Mecca was an intellectual centre of the Ottoman Empire: “People didn’t always go there just on haj. They went there to discuss and debate the reform of Islam.”