The protagonist Saleem Sinai’s fate in Salman Rushdie’s Booker Prize-winning novel Midnight’s Children (Jonathan Cape, 1981) is meticulously tied with what unfolds in the subcontinent. The unique circumstance of Sinai’s birth — for he was born at the stroke of the midnight hour on 15 August 1947, the exact moment when India freed itself from the British colonial rule — seems to both interfere with and inform the future of his birth country.
A familial story can act as — to borrow an optical phraseology — an aperture to expose the story of a nation at large, one can conclude. But such intertwining of fates has been an enterprise of fiction, not real life. Cinematographer Nusrat Fatima Jafri’s book This Land We Call Home: The Story of a Family, Caste, Conversions and Modern India, a nonfiction account, however, presents itself as a near-perfect candidate.
Its distinctive achievement is in extrapolating a changing India’s story by telling the story of her family, right from her great grandfather Hardayal Singh’s (circa 1870) time to the present-day India where hatred against minorities of any kind, religious in particular, seems to inspire purchase to accomplish virtually anything.
Divided into three parts titled Roots, Trunk, and Branches, the book’s structure inevitably seems to give a humble nod to the ‘tree of life’ metaphor, reminding me of the Nobel Peace Prize-winning Kenyan activist Wangarĩ Maathai. The latter had once noted that
“[a] tree has roots in the soil yet reaches to the sky. It tells us that in order to aspire, we need to be grounded and that no matter how high we go, it is from our roots that we draw sustenance.”
In informing readers why Singh chose to convert to Christianity, Jafri seems to be reenergising herself to come to terms with her own aspirations. And as the book progresses, one can appreciate the various strands of personal and political history that ‘branch’ out, signalling vertical growth and expanse of the story. Upon familiarising oneself with Jafri’s storytelling, one also sees value in the ground that she manages to cover horizontally, in the literary sense, by contextualising the construction of modern-day India.
“The wintery night held a stagnant quietness within its recesses. A jackal’s howl could be heard faintly in the distance. Hardayal Singh woke up with a start, his chest tightening, gasping for air,” thus begins this book, eerily resembling the beginning of a fictional account that promises to tell an intergenerational story. The Prologue also highlights how Singh, who had moved with his family and cattle from Alwar in Rajasthan to Sitapur in (present-day) Uttar Pradesh in 1920, found himself mistaken for the much-fabled dacoit Sultana Singh. Cinephiles reading this book may recall Anurag Kashyap-directed Gangs of Wasseypur (2012) leveraging the Sultana Daku tale as a plot point. Jafri, however, proffers this anecdote to critique caste-based discrimination. She notes how her great-grandfather skirmishes upon hearing ‘Bhantu’ — a tribe most of whose members could trace “their lineage to Rajputs, from the army of Rana Pratap” but more so they were considered to be a “nomadic community, allowed only at the periphery of villages”, making Jafri conclude that “[f]rom new names and a new religion to a new casteless identity, it felt liberating yet harsh at times.”
In Roots, part I of the book, Jafri, who worked on this book as a 2021 South Asia Speaks (SAS) fellow, eloquently enumerates several anthropological questions that can plague a reader’s mind. From elaborating how the Criminal Tribes Act of 1871 came to be and learning how her Bhantu ancestors could’ve been “packed away” to suffer in Kaala Paani (prison in colonial India in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands) as a result, to sharing how her grandmother Prudence (aka Chunno) — Hardayal and Kalyani’s seventh daughter born in 1922 — could’ve been cast opposite superstar Dilip Kumar in Jwaar Bhata (1944), it serves more than the first act of a three-act dramedy.
Had it not been for her research, several strands she manages to connect with the conversion scenario in pre-independent India wouldn’t have been contextualised for a 21st-century Indian reader. But here’s something that needs reiteration. Jafri writes,
“As missionary Rev. Phillip Godfrey wrote in his detailed book Outcastes’ Hope, shedding light on the challenges faced by the Bhantu and similar communities striving for a better future, ‘Hinduism is as much a social system as a religion, and that social system is built upon caste. Whatever weakens caste, weakens Hinduism.’”
This underscores why the casteist mindset finds a new leverage in the Hindutva-promoting government in power.
In the second part of the book, Trunk, the author’s mother Meera features predominantly. Upon learning that the latter was born in 1947, I immediately rooted for the mention of Midnight’s Children in the book and was delighted to find it. Meera’s marriage with Syed Abid Ali Jafri was again no less than the domain in which fiction thrives. For example, the details Jafri supplies help conclude how witnessing horrific domestic violence as a child, Meera seemingly developed a reluctant attitude towards being her own person. Perhaps it was the grace with which to handle a relationship that Prudence could only transfer as a form of inheritance to Meera. While the former faced a good share of ostracization when she had eloped with John Wilson Bunch and married him in 1946, the latter’s interfaith marriage had “garnered attendance from some and boycott from many”. To learn Jafri’s family history is to notice how little has changed in India, how strongly has identity politics divided people instead of celebrating differences, and how not adhering to the heavily revered caste-hetero-patriarchy continues to get people into trouble, often resulting in their death.
Part II is particularly exciting to read as it effectively elucidates how right-wing politics managed to find a foothold in a seemingly secular land. From the commentary on the Emergency period and multiple wars with Pakistan and the birth of Bangladesh, in part II, to the Babri Masjid demolition, J. P. movement, and the anti-Sikh pogrom of 1984 after Indira Gandhi’s assassination in the subsequent part, Branches, all events of immense political significance to the history of modern India are adroitly weaved into this personal narrative. This alluded to the fact that India was growing parallelly with the family. But this geometrical term isn’t loosely used here. Two lines remain parallel so long the distance between them remains constant (and it should be significant enough to help appreciate these two lines as distinct, independent). There’s a great deal of both narrative and temporal distance that Jafri manages to maintain in writing the part I and II of this book. However, at least I felt that the distance between the observed and the observation collapses in the third part where things begin to happen in a jiffy. Which is understandable as the author begins documenting herself in this part. It’s visible that she isn’t able to write herself as effectively as she’s able to write others, which to be fair, the author does share a part of herself. Despite the narrative registering peak acceleration here, it feels like a rushed drive to the end. Though there are several moments that Jafri documents in this section that are very telling of the gaze that ‘other’ people who may not themselves feel ‘othered’. For example, this question: “But you don’t look Muslim, are you a convert?” Or how during Jafri’s marriage with a Bengali man, the latter’s family “jumped at the prospect of coming to Lucknow” and the “reason for their enthusiasm” was food.
Punctuated by events that helped shape modern-day India, This Land We Call Home is not only a family’s story, but also an attempt to preserve and make accessible an undocumented cultural memory like never before.
