Book
Title: October 1947: Wails
of Fallen Autumn Leaves
Author: Ankush Sharma
Publisher: Notion Press, 2023
Pages: 319
Religion has never ceased to baffle me ever since I
said good bye to it in my twenties. On the one hand, we are told that religion
is meant to foster goodness in the human heart, while on the other, what we
actually witness is incessant brutality perpetrated in its name day after day.
Why is there such an appalling gap between the professed objective and the
actual reality? I am yet to find a satisfactory answer.
Ankush Sharma’s novel, October
1947, is not about religion. It is about the Poonch Rebellion that
followed India’s Independence. What runs throughout the novel, however, is a
Hindu-Muslim conflict. Rather a Muslim onslaught on Hindus. The novel projects
Muslims, too many of them at any rate, as heartless rapists and bloodthirsty
murderers. The Hindus are all their victims in the novel.
The initial leader of the Muslim
Conference in Poonch is Muneer Khan who is an exception. He is a benign public
figure who is committed genuinely to Hindu-Muslim unity. His present objective
– in the beginning of the novel which is in Oct 1947 – is demilitarisation of
Poonch. His other motto is ‘No Place for Religious Hatred.’ However, such good
people don’t last long in politics. Muneer Khan is soon got rid of shrewdly and
viciously by his successor, Nawab Shah Ali Khan, who is ruthless and full of
hatred against Hindus.
The novel presents the brutality that
Nawab Khan unleashes on the Hindus in the region which eventually leads to the
accession of a part of Kashmir to Pakistan. That part came to be known as
Pakistan-occupied-Kashmir [PoK].
The plot revolves around a few
individual victims of Nawab Khan’s brutality. It is individual characters who
make up the soul of a novel and Ankush Sharma has done justice to the portrayal
of these characters many of whom were real persons. Their actual names are used
in the novel too. That makes the novel all the more fascinating. We are even
given the photos of some of them at the end of the novel. The author met some
of them personally before writing the novel. The story is founded on firsthand
information gathered from the victims, in other words. The obvious drawback of
such a novel is the possibility of the novelist’s sympathies leaning heavily
towards the victims while the oppressors’ villainy tends to be magnified.
Ankush Sharma does make an effort to
be balanced. He makes an effort to retrieve Muneer Khan’s goodness towards the
end. But I shall not be a spoilsport here by revealing too much about the end
of the novel. Let me tell you this much: you will relish this novel if you are
visibly on the side of the right-wing nationalists in present India. You will
tolerate it if you are on nobody’s side. You will hate it if you are a Muslim.
Since I am a seeker of the truths
that underlie religions, I was left with a bafflement towards the end of the
novel. Why do religions make people so vicious? True, the novel highlights the
villainy of one particular religion and that religion is conspicuously
villainous in today’s world too. But that religion is not the only religion
which adds prodigiously to the dark matter in the cosmos.
Ankush Sharma’s novel is not written
to answer that question, however. In spite of its all-too-obvious
one-sidedness, the novel makes for a gripping reading. There is cinematic
action and suspense in the narrative. The style is rather amateurish. It holds
out much promise, nevertheless.
PS. I received an
author-signed copy of the novel via a Blog-hop led by Manali Desai and Sukaina Majeed.
Hari Om
ReplyDeleteGood question to ask. I find myself asking another...is it truly a novel if real people are central to its telling? Doesn't it cross into the territory of biography, slyly annexed like the PoK itself...? YAM xx
The author has made certain imaginative and aesthetic changes to what actually happened, so it becomes more fiction than reality.
DeleteThe problem with organized religion is that it is run by people. And people who come to prominence in any human endeavor are by design those that wish for power. It does not matter the endeavor. While there are always those who wish to do good, there are also those who want power, no matter what. And they will pretend anything attain and keep it.
ReplyDeleteNever heard of this book.
ReplyDeleteNot likely, it's not available in your country, I think.
DeleteReligion has always been an instrument in the hands of its makers.
ReplyDelete