Lounge
Geetanjali Shree on ‘Our City That Year’ and the politics of violence
Summary
In her novel 'Our City That Year', International Booker Prize winner Geetanjali Shree explores the struggle to respond to communal violenceThe unnamed narrator of Geetanjali Shree’s novel Our City That Year (recently translated by Daisy Rockwell from the original Hindi, Hamara Sheher Us Baras, 1998) tells us the story of three young people—writer Shruti, her sociologist husband Hanif and their friend/landlord Sharad, who is also Hanif’s colleague—struggling to respond to communal violence in their unnamed city. The book’s fourth principal character is Daddu, Sharad’s retired father, a genteel, progressive, profoundly moral figure.
Around them, as the city descends into madness, the narrator expresses her fear of running out of ink, the way a place can run out of petrol during times of unrest. Another time, the words “Hindu" and “Muslim" visit her nightmares in corporeal form, boots click-clacking with military rhythm and precision. These striking images, deployed within the narrative framework of the novel, are fever-dream manifestations of the moral and writerly anxieties stared down by Shruti, Hanif and their kind every day.
“One begins every new work for a different reason. This is a novel about confusion," Shree says when we meet in Delhi. “The narrator is confused about how to tell this particular story, about the kind of atmosphere where communal violence happens. She feels every method, every approach, every possible angle to this narrative has been exhausted. It is therefore difficult to offer meaningful commentary, but equally hard to stay silent. This pashopesh, dilemma, and the trauma that comes out of it are what impelled me to write this novel."
The trio’s attempts at making sense of the tragedy can be described as flailing, at best. Shruti keeps writing poignant first lines about the bloodshed and abandoning them to write love stories. All around them is a potent propaganda campaign—the dissemination of Islamophobia in hate speeches, cassettes and inflammatory “history pamphlets".
“Sometimes I fret over Our City That Year being called a Babri novel," Shree says. “What I really wanted to do was capture the societal settings that make an event like Babri possible in the first place (and) to portray the sense of futility in the aftermath of such an event." Our City That Year frequently mentions the limitations of fiction as well as every form of writing, including academia and journalism. A searing passage sees Shree invoking Phanishwar Nath Renu and Premchand, Hindi titans widely perceived as conscientious chroniclers of Indian (especially north Indian) society’s fault lines: “If Renu and Premchand had made an entrance at that historic moment, they would have ably captured our history in their writing and left precious gems for researchers of the future. But did our city need precious gems? Or a huge rock to hurl at people’s skulls so they could examine the blood and pus flowing from their wounds and understand how we’d changed?"
In the late 1980s, Shree wrote an “intellectual biography" of Premchand, Between Two Worlds, about the political and moral contradictions in his work, contradictions typical of educated middle-class Indian intellectuals of his time. In this context, Shruti, Hanif and Sharad—not to mention the university’s sociology department where the two men work—can be read as the 1990s successors to Premchand and his middle-class peers.
This isn’t to suggest that nothing has changed in the intervening years. Our City That Year makes this point with Daddu, Sharad’s Ghalib-quoting father, a bridge between India’s softer past (relatively speaking) and its Hindutva-machismo-driven present. A running gag has Daddu launch into nostalgic “those were the days" stories from his childhood, stories with broadly progressive themes. As the novel progresses, Daddu becomes one of its most dynamic elements, its funny-sad, young-old moral lynchpin. His anecdotes become more sophisticated in form and content, gently peeling back the layers of anguish beneath his superficially jaunty demeanour.
Also read: Airplane mode by Shahnaz Habib: Why be a traveller, choose to stay home
“I don’t know if I have the right words for what I’m trying to say here, because it’s so easy to come across as jingoistic," Shree says. “That’s not what I aim to be at all with my writing. But this novel has come out of great concern for my home, my family, my motherland. These communities have come out of a past where there was the cruelty and bloodshed of Partition but also so much fondness for each other. There was communication, participation in each other’s lives. So where is all this violence coming from? And what is it doing to my country?"
In her translator’s note, Rockwell writes that “reading sleuths" will find “surprising echoes" of Shree’s International Booker Prize winning novel, Tomb of Sand (also translated by Rockwell). This is accurate, not least because Tomb of Sand was a culmination of recurring themes in Shree’s body of work. Physical spaces, especially homes, are often sites of contestation in her fiction. The intertwined forces of patriarchy and heteronormativity are confronted on the all-important roof in Tirohit (2001; translated by Rahul Soni as The Roof Beneath Her Feet in 2013), where a “forbidden romance" between Chhacho and Lalna unfolds. The two women are on opposite ends of the class spectrum; the younger Lalna is a poor relative who does household work for Chhacho. The roof is a liminal space, at once public and private. In Our City That Year this dynamic is played out by the building where Shruti, Hanif, Sharad and Daddu live. In its confines, Sharad is emboldened to use the religious slur katua (circumcised) for Hanif. This ironic, playful usage is only possible because their socioeconomic privilege makes the house “private". When communal violence escalates, Sharad quietly removes Hanif’s name from the “public" nameplate outside.
Flowers, trees, animals and other bezubaan (voiceless) entities are often given voices in Shree’s work—in the Greek chorus of crows from Tomb of Sand or the short story Maa, March aur Sakura, where cherry blossoms become a symbol of profound changes in the life of the protagonist’s mother. In Our City That Year, too, as the city is deserted post-riots, Shree writes that it’s cats who have taken over, crossing streets, sunning themselves on parapets, staking claim over the domains of humans.
The depiction of Sharad and Hanif’s sociology department has been informed by some of Shree’s experiences in academia. The department’s founder and head Prof. Nandan is a memorable character, a diligent but strictly by-the-book academic who crosses paths with the young protagonists. He is the logical endpoint of the path of least resistance. He respects Hanif’s intellectual ability but tries to scupper his attendance of a European seminar. He indulges the argumentative outpourings of Sharad and Hanif (usually aimed at him) but when Hanif is targeted by the city’s hatemongers, Nandan’s defence of his younger colleague is non-committal, even hesitant.
“Characters like Nandan are actually well-meaning," Shree says. “They understand what’s going on around them. At some level they do want to speak out, to be a part of the solution rather than the problem but they are also aware of the high cost of speaking out. And it’s a very human tendency to look out for one’s own self-interests. Nandan represents the vast majority of people who find themselves in such situations."
When I first read the Hindi novel several years ago, I thought it was angrier than any of Shree’s other works but there’s an unmistakable quietness, a sense of linguistic serenity on the page even as Shree describes the darkest corners of a violent mind. It’s like watching a series of controlled explosions, and a big part of what makes Our City That Year a masterpiece.
“However angry or disturbed you are, however messy the reality that is impelling you to write, you have to take it to a place of quiet," Shree says. “Art and literature should be expressed from that place of quiet. I feel like this novel is more about despair than anger. People told me after reading the novel tum koi ummeed hi nahi chhorti (you leave us with no hope whatsoever) It’s the kind of despair that makes you think ‘Is this all humans can do?’"
Aditya Mani Jha is a Delhi-based writer.
