Skip to main content

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.

Labels

Labels:

Comments

  1. Yamini MacLeanJuly 18, 2024 at 1:21 PM

    Hari Om
    Good 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

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalJuly 18, 2024 at 2:18 PM

      The author has made certain imaginative and aesthetic changes to what actually happened, so it becomes more fiction than reality.

      Delete
  2. Liz A.July 19, 2024 at 1:04 AM

    The 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.

    ReplyDelete
  3. peppylady (Dora)July 19, 2024 at 6:41 AM

    Never heard of this book.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalJuly 19, 2024 at 9:07 AM

      Not likely, it's not available in your country, I think.

      Delete
  4. vanderloostJuly 25, 2024 at 5:52 AM

    Religion has always been an instrument in the hands of its makers.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...
16 comments
Read more

The Call of Islamic State

A year ago, the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism – The Hague (ICCT) reported that about 4000 people from the West left their homes and countries to join the Islamic State (IS).  Many of them are women.  The reporters had made a special study of the women who joined the terrorist outfit and found that it was difficult to categorise which type of women were particularly drawn to IS. “While most of the girls are young, some as young as fifteen,” says the report,  “there are also mothers with young children who make the trip. Some of the girls have difficulties in school and are said to have an IQ below average,  but there are also women who are highly educated. It also appears that even though a relatively large portion of the girls had (or still have) a troubled childhood, there are some who come from families with no known problems with the authorities. Most of the girls come from religiously moderate Muslim families,  yet some converted to Islam a...
33 comments
Read more

Liberated

Fiction - parable Vijay was familiar enough with soil and the stones it turns up to realise that he had struck something rare.   It was a tiny stone, a pitch black speck not larger than the tip of his little finger. It turned up from the intestine of the earth while Vijay was digging a pit for the biogas plant. Anand, the scientist from the village, got the stone analysed in his lab and assured, “It is a rare object.   A compound of carbonic acid and magnesium.” Anand and his fellow scientists believed that it must be a fragment of a meteoroid that hit the earth millions of years ago.   “Very rare indeed,” concluded the scientist. Now, it’s plain commonsense that something that’s very rare indeed must be very valuable too. All the more so if it came from the heavens. So Vijay got the village goldsmith to set it on a gold ring.   Vijay wore the ring proudly on his ring finger. Nobody, in the village, however bothered to pay any homage to Vijay’s...
47 comments
Read more

The Plague

When the world today is struggling with the pandemic of Covid-19, Albert Camus’s novel The Plague can offer some stimulating lessons. When a plague breaks out in the city of Oran, initially the political authorities fail to deal with it as a serious problem. The ordinary people also don’t view it as an epidemic that requires public action rather than as individual annoyances. The people of Oran are obsessed with their personal sufferings and inconveniences. Finally the authorities are forced to put Oran in quarantine. Father Paneloux, a Jesuit priest, delivers a sermon declaring the epidemic as God’s punishment for Oran’s sins. Months of suffering make people rise above their selfish notions and obsessions and join anti-plague efforts being carried out by people like Dr Rieux. Dr Rieux is an atheist but committed to service of humanity. He questions Father Paneloux’s religious views when a small boy is killed by the epidemic. The priest delivers another sermon on the necess...
28 comments
Read more

AAP and I

Who defeated Arvind Kejriwal?  Himself or us? His party ruled for just 49 days.  They were momentous days.  He implemented his promise on setting up a number for reporting corruption; in two weeks instead of the promised two days.  He met people to discuss corruption issues, though the crowd was beyond his control.  He did what he could.  He would have done more if he could.  He put an end to the VVIP culture in politics.  The politician became aam aadmi.  Ministers started travelling in vehicles without the screaming red lights and horrifying screeches.  But the police had to go out of their way to provide protection to the chief minister.  Who defeated the chief minister’s vision that political leaders need no such protection from their own people? He revolutionised the admission procedures in schools.  Schools which charged hefty amounts from parents illegally stood to lose.  The aam aadmi would have g...
25 comments
Read more