Nistula Hebbar: Loyalty of love and reason

For those born in India in the 1970s and 1980s, Partition has been depicted as a single event in the hot summer of 1947. An event in which communal passions arose and huge populations crossed the border. But there is also a hidden story of Partition, a story which came home to me when I was a college student visiting my friend Rumman Hameed, the daughter of a silversmith who lived and worked in Delhi's Chandni Chowk area.

Rumman's family is one among the lakhs of families divided by Partition, with members on either side. But the really strange aspect, for me, was that her uncle, who owned a shop in Connaught Place survived partition only to move to Karachi in the 1960s. Rumman always told me that it was the economic boycott his business faced after 1947 that influenced his decision. For her family, Partition had therefore occurred in the 1960s, another event in a long continuum of her family's experience of what it means to be Muslim in India, after the last Mughal emperor was packed off by the British in 1857 to Rangoon.

Which brings us to M J Akbar's latest book, Blood Brothers, a fantastic story passionately told. Rarely has the complex relationship between India's Hindus and Muslims been so sensitively written about. The book not just busts many myths propagated by fundamentalists on both sides, it also provides a voice to that most unspoken of minds: that of the liberal Muslim.

When M J Akbar questions his father as to why he returned in 1947 to Telinipara from Dhaka, which he had fled in fear of mob violence, his answer is unequivocal: there were too many Muslims there. This reason is enough to poke a hole in the entire premise of a shared religion, to the exclusion of other commonalities, being a sound basis of modern statehood.

The family's story, however, begins long before that event in famine-hit Bihar, from where an intrepid Prayaag, the author's grandfather, moves as a child to Telinipara in Bengal's jute belt in search of food and family. He is taken in by a Muslim tea shop owner, and converts to Islam out of the highest of all motivations, love. An upwardly mobile man, his circle of Hindu and Muslim friends deal with potentially combustible situations as best they can.

The tone of the book is of a bedtime tale told through long nights, of family legends and stories which have been retold so often that they become part of one's thought process. I don't know whether M J Akbar's research took him long or the book came to him as a recollection of stories he had been told, but he weaves historical details into the story quite seamlessly.

Details like the dialogues of the Marx Brothers movie that his father sees in Calcutta, the life of the white sahibs at Victoria jute mill, the fulcrum of economic life in Telinipara, and most of all the strange bazaar buzz of a riot about to happen, are all just right. An important event in Blood Brothers is the launching and failure of the Khilafat movement. It is perhaps for the first time that the movement has been held accountable in such a manner for the forces that it unleashed.

The most moving parts of the novel for me occur right at the end, when a young M J Akbar, shaken by the death of his friend Kamala in a communal riot by a bullet meant for him, returns to Presidency College from Telinipara. He now has a heightened sense of awareness that life for him has changed irrevocably. At seventeen, life has already assumed a responsibility that will not be shrugged off. They become "blood brothers" of the title.

The scope of the book in its historical sweep is large, from the 1870s to the late 1960s. It is a good read, more so for the fact that for a large number of young people in India, for reasons only CBSE can explain, the country's post-independence history is a cipher, only to be understood through boring political science lectures on the Constitution.

This book fills at least some part of that void, even if it's best read merely as one narrative among the many others that could be told. In all, this book should especially be read by anyone who thinks that the Indian Muslim should be subjected to a local version of the "Tebbit" cricket loyalty test ("which side do you cheer?") time and again.

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BLOOD BROTHERS
A FAMILY SAGA

M J Akbar
Roli Books
Price: Rs 395
Pages: 346