The Religion of Poonch Rebellion

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.