Skip to main content

Some Lucky Muslims in Modi’s Land


Book Review


Title: The Lucky Ones: A Memoir

Author: Zara Chowdhary

Publisher: Context – Westland Books, 2024

Pages: 309


At the beginning of Julian Barnes’s novel, The Sense of an Ending, history is described by a young student as “the lies of the victors.” His teacher reminds him that it could also be “the self-delusions of the defeated.” Later, as the young student grows up into a mature adult and sees more of life, he learns that history is “more the memories of the survivors, most of whom are neither victorious nor defeated.”

Zara Chowdhary is a survivor – neither victor nor defeated – of the 2002 anti-Muslim Gujarat riots which she calls “genocide” many times in her book. She was a 16-year-old girl just about to complete her school when she and many others like her got trapped in the little worlds of their houses as murderous mobs went around entering the houses of Muslims, killing the men and raping the women, and perpetrating some most inhuman deeds such as ripping open the wombs of pregnant women…

The Gujarat riots of 2002 must be one of the darkest episodes in independent India’s history. It killed hundreds of Muslims, displaced thousands, and catapulted Narendra Modi as the Saviour of Hinduism. From the balcony of her eighth floor flat in Ahmedabad, Zara witnessed the depravity that her fellow humans were capable of hitting in the name of religion.

The book gives us Zara’s memories of what she witnessed and survived. The narrative is, in fact, a survivor’s song. If you are a 16-year-old girl caught in such a situation that could get you a knife in your belly any time after being raped by a whole mob of men, your memories can’t but be subjective. And that’s just what this memoir is: unapologetically subjective narrative.

It is not only the political system that turned against the writer and people like her. Right in the beginning of the book, we are told that “Our home believed in many things but not its daughters.” The writer’s family life wasn’t a happy one either. Her father, Zaheer, who was a clerk in the Gujarat Electricity Board, took voluntary retirement too early in life because he couldn’t put up with the discrimination he faced at his workplace on account of being a Muslim. He took to drinking and made life miserable at home for everyone.

Zaheer’s sister left her husband and came to live with her brother and family. She and her daughter contribute their share of wretchedness to the existing woes. Then there is Dadi (Zaheer’s mother) who bosses over everyone else. There is a cauldron of churning cultures too. Dadi came from an anglicised wealthy Gujarati family. Her husband was from a peasant family in Punjab. He died rather young, probably unable to endure his wife’s dominance. Zara’s mother was a Tamil, ten years younger to Zaheer. The Gujarati Dadi thought that the Tamil daughter-in-law was the cause of all problems at home, even that of the cancer that would eventually kill Zaheer.

Later, when Zara and her sister leave their apartment in Ahmadabad and go to live in Madras (Chennai today) with their mother who longed for some peace in life, life does turn pleasant. Madras’s “ocean and people embraced our broken hearts and made us whole again,” Chowdhary writes. It is a Hindu man named Rishi who helps them to start anew all over.

This book is an elegant poem, painful though it is. There is much violence and brutality in many of its pages. There are explicit references to Narendra Modi’s heartless rise in politics by making a whole community of people the quintessential ‘other’ in his state. Modi knows too well the importance of an inimical ‘other’ in the absence of which a people can turn inwards and create their own battles in the name of caste or rituals or “whose grandfather twirls prayer beads faster.”

However, Modi doesn’t dominate the book, mercifully. The book is not about the riots though they rage in the background almost all the while. The book is about human behaviour when a human-made catastrophe strikes a society. Catastrophes bring out not only the vultures in people but also the doves. We meet people of different types here thrown together on to a battleground by a political system whose head (the chief minister) asked a former MP (a Muslim) whether he was still alive, when he requested protection from the murderous mob that had assembled outside his house. (The MP was killed soon after that phone conversation.)

In the end, in spite of all the hatred and bloodshed, love survives and dominates the narrative. There are people who care. And they forge this country’s evolving greatness. They create the humour, the refuge, the magnanimity, humility, “ability to bend and absorb every shard of grief thrown its way, and from it to grow flowers, to make life.”

PS. Zara Chowdhary now teaches in the University of Wisconsin, USA.

Comments

  1. Hari Om
    ...I suppose one of the things that history reveals is that society manages along, regardless of where its leaders lead... somehow, goodness does emerge victorious in the end. For those who do survive. All power to those who can find the words to describe it. YAM xx

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I'm not sure whether goodness emerges victorious, but some goodness does survive. And it remains to tell the tale. I wish it had a haunting power too. Maybe it does. Time will tell.

      Delete
  2. What a terrible tale. People suck a lot of the time.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. The Muslims in Modi's Gujarat had it painfully hard in 2002. Genocide it was.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...

The Ugly Duckling

Source: Acting Company A. A. Milne’s one-act play, The Ugly Duckling , acquired a classical status because of the hearty humour used to present a profound theme. The King and the Queen are worried because their daughter Camilla is too ugly to get a suitor. In spite of all the devious strategies employed by the King and his Chancellor, the princess remained unmarried. Camilla was blessed with a unique beauty by her two godmothers but no one could see any beauty in her physical appearance. She has an exquisitely beautiful character. What use is character? The King asks. The play is an answer to that question. Character plays the most crucial role in our moral science books and traditional rhetoric, religious scriptures and homilies. When it comes to practical life, we look for other things such as wealth, social rank, physical looks, and so on. As the King says in this play, “If a girl is beautiful, it is easy to assume that she has, tucked away inside her, an equally beauti...

Helpless Gods

Illustration by Gemini Six decades ago, Kerala’s beloved poet Vayalar Ramavarma sang about gods that don’t open their eyes, don’t know joy or sorrow, but are mere clay idols. The movie that carried the song was a hit in Kerala in the late 1960s. I was only seven when the movie was released. The impact of the song, like many others composed by the same poet, sank into me a little later as I grew up. Our gods are quite useless; they are little more than narcissists who demand fresh and fragrant flowers only to fling them when they wither. Six decades after Kerala’s poet questioned the potency of gods, the Chief Justice of India had a shoe flung at him by a lawyer for the same thing: questioning the worth of gods. The lawyer was demanding the replacement of a damaged idol of god Vishnu and the Chief Justice wondered why gods couldn’t take care of themselves since they are omnipotent. The lawyer flung his shoe at the Chief Justice to prove his devotion to a god. From Vayalar of 196...

Our gods must have died laughing

A friend forwarded a video clip this morning. It is an extract from a speech that celebrated Malayalam movie actor Sreenivasan delivered years ago. In the year 1984, Sreenivasan decided to marry the woman he was in love with. But his career in movies had just started and so he hadn’t made much money. Knowing his financial condition, another actor, Innocent, gave him Rs 400. Innocent wasn’t doing well either in the profession. “Alice’s bangle,” Innocent said. He had pawned or sold his wife’s bangle to get that amount for his friend. Then Sreenivasan went to Mammootty, who eventually became Malayalam’s superstar, to request for help. Mammootty gave him Rs 2000. Citing the goodness of the two men, Sreenivasan said that the wedding necklace ( mangalsutra ) he put ceremoniously around the neck of his Hindu wife was funded by a Christian (Innocent) and a Muslim (Mammootty). “What does religion matter?” Sreenivasan asks in the video. “You either refuse to believe in any or believe in a...