Blood Brothers

M. J. Akbar

Description

Blood Brothers is M.J. Akbar's amazing story of three generations of a Muslim family - based on his own - and how they deal with the fluctuating contours of Hindu-Muslim relations. Telinipara, a small jute mill town some 30 miles north of Kolkata along the Hooghly, is a complex Rubik's Cube of migrant Bihari workers, Hindus and Muslims; Bengalis poor and 'bhadralok'; and Sahibs who live in the safe, 'foreign'world of the Victoria Jute Mill. Into this scattered inhabitation enters a child on the verge of starvation, Prayaag, who is saved and adopted by a Muslim family, converts to Islam and takes on the name of Rahmatullah. As Rahmatullah knits Telinipara into a community, friendship, love trust and faith are continually tested by the cancer of riots. Incidents - conversion, circumcision, the arrival of the plague of electricity - and a fascinating array of characters - the ultimate Brahmin, Rahmatullah's friend Girija Maharaj; the worker's leader, Bauna Sardar; the storyteller, Talat Mian; the poet- teacher, Syed Ashfaque; the smiling mendicant, Burha Deewana; the sincere Sahib, Simon Hogg; and then the questioning, demanding third generation of the author and his friend Kamala - interlink into a narrative of social history as well as a powerful memoir. Blood Brothers is a chronicle of its age, its canvas as enchanting as its narrative, a personal journey through change as tensions build, stretching the bonds of a lifetime to breaking point and demanding, in the end, the greatest sacrifice. Its last chapters, written in a bare-bones, unemotional style, are the most moving as the author searches for hope amid raw wounds with a surgeon's scalpel.

Sujets

• Journalists
• Publishers
• Religión
• Hindú
• Clase (informática)
• Musulmán
• Struggle
• Biography
• Muslim
• Hindu
• Religion
• Class
• Family
• Autobiography
• Muslim ben al-Hajjaj
• Editors
• Drama
• Indian
• Saga

Informations

• Publié par: Roli Books
• Date de parution: 10 août 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9788174369307
• Langue: English

Extrait

BLOOD BROTHERS

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BLOOD BROTHERS
A F a m i l y S a g a
M.J. Akbar

LOTUS COLLECTION

ROLI BOOKS

Lotus Collection
© M.J. Akbar , 2006
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the publisher.
First published in 2006
The Lotus Collection
An imprint of
Roli Books Pvt. Ltd.
M-75, G.K. II Market, New Delhi 110 048
Phones: ++91 (011) 2921 2271, 2921 2782
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Cover design : Sneha Pamneja Layout design : Narendra Shahi
ISBN: 81-7436-439-0
Typeset in ACaslon Regular by Roli Books Pvt. Ltd. and printed at Syndicate Binders, Noida (UP)

~
To the next generation, Mukulika and Prayaag
~

CONTENTS

1 PRAYAAG
2 DREAMS
3 CONVERSION
4 PLEASURES
5 DREAD
6 DERVISH
7 APHRODISIAC
8 DESIRE
9 KRISHNA
10 WORDS
11 SAHIBS
12 BRIDGES
13 BLOOD
14 BRAHMA
15 FRIENDS
16 STARS
17 OFFERING
18 BIKINI
19 BROTHERS

1
PRAYAAG
MY GRANDFATHER DIED WHILE I WAS PLAYING ON HIS CHEST . That was my first stroke of luck. My elder aunt, dark, wise, hunched against her corner of the courtyard, promptly declared that his soul, seething with miracles, had passed into me. My younger aunt, widowed, and a flitting presence at home because she was often possessed by raving spirits, promptly agreed. The motion, having been moved and affirmed, became established family fact.
I was about a year old, fat and indeterminate of face in the manner of babies with enough to eat. My grandfather was fond of me, possibly because I was not yet old enough to ask for money. He was a miser. The thought of parting with cash wrought great misery upon his soul, now possibly transmigrated to me. He had his reasons. The most important one was that he nearly died of hunger when he was eleven.
Starvation is a slow fire that sucks life out in little bursts, leaving pockets of unlinked vacuum inside. Death comes when the points of emptiness suddenly coalesce; there is a silent implosion. The worst is in the beginning, when the body still has the energy to rebel and the mind enough hope to fear. When hope fades, fear evolves into a dazed weariness. You turn numb, and it no longer matters whether you are alive or dead. Dadu, our affectionate term for grandfather, had drifted into that zone when a short bald man in a vest and a sarong, known locally as a lungi, shook his lifeless shoulders and offered him a thick home-baked biscuit softened in tea.
The escape from death began three days earlier in the Bihar village where he was born, near the squalid town of Buxar. The great moment in Buxar’s history had come about a hundred years earlier, when the splendidly colourful soldiers of the East India Company, led by Major Hector Munro, defeated the joint forces of the Emperor Shah Alam of Delhi, Nawab Mir Qasim of Bengal and Nawab Shuja ud Daulah of Avadh on 16 August 1765. Till that point, the East India Company was known as the English Company. After Buxar, admirers renamed it Company Bahadur, or the Heroic Company. It was extraordinary how Indians became transformed when they switched sides: disciplined, unwavering under the command of the white man, and pathetic buffoons under the green and black-and-white standards of Muslim dynasties in decline. One old man could still do a wondrous imitation, learnt from his forefathers, of a Mughal champion who swung his heavy sword in thin air so vigorously before battle that he was utterly exhausted when actual fighting began. He was fortunate. He survived. But why cast aspersions on a mere braggart? Most of his compatriots preferred to disappear rather than die, after an initial, very brief surge of heroics. The white man passed into local legend: he stood his line against the charge, and left it only to go forward. The Muslims were high on bravado and short on bravery. They carried too much baggage around the waist: their bellies sagged with curry and sloth.
British rule was a welcome relief from gathering chaos. It took one lifespan for optimism to change to apprehension: British stability was soon interspersed with famine. The British were individually more honest than the Mughals, but collectively more greedy. Taxes were too high, and their middlemen, the class known as zamindars, took pleasure in adding insult to extortion. The peasant did not have the surplus to resist a drought, so drought degenerated into famine. Fighting hunger became a fulltime job. There was not much strength left to fight a government.
My grandfather lost his parents to a famine that started around 1870 and emptied his village within five years. Those who could, migrated. Some were shipped out by British merchants to plantations across the seven seas, in the West Indies or Mauritius or Fiji. They were not called slaves since slavery had been abolished by Britain. They were given another name: Indentured labour. It was a polite term invented for similiar conditions.
~
My grandfather was born a Hindu and named, rather grandly, Prayaag, after the confluence of the holy rivers, Ganga and Jamuna. The grandeur reflected his caste, for he was a Kshatriya, born of the arms of Brahma. His mother taught him his faith: the universe was once a dark vacuum, which the Eternal Creator injected with energy. From energy emerged light, and then water. Water flowed from the Lord’s body, and in it the Lord’s semen. That semen turned into a golden egg brighter than the sun, from which, after one year, emerged Brahma, the originator of mankind. With the power of his thought, Brahma divided himself into two, and opposites were born: earth and sky, and the four directions. He meditated and the “I” evolved, both the self and the senses. Brahma divided mankind into four castes to establish order: the Brahmin from his mouth, the Kshatriya from his arms, the Vaishyas from his thighs and the untouchable Sudras from his feet.
Famine had no caste. Funnily enough, famine was kinder to the Sudra than to the Brahmin, for the scum of the earth were familiar with hunger while the salt of the earth were not.
Prayaag had heard stories of the jute mills of Bengal from his father. The stories were told in driblets, as if to ease the pain as they watched their land slowly become sterile. They owned some four bighas; nothing substantial, but not worthless either. They once lived comfortably on an income of about seven rupees a month, and he fondly remembered one year when the family income crossed one hundred rupees. Drought had reduced that to two rupees a month if not less, and that wretch of a rent-collector had sunk so low that he demanded taxes even from castebrothers in a season of hunger.
Jute mills were the powerful engines of a new economy that swelled along the banks of the Hooghly, a tributary of the mighty Ganges that swung south and flowed through Calcutta on its way to the Bay of Bengal and the Indian Ocean. Prayaag had heard that a new mill, named after the Great Queen of London, Victoria, had opened in a place called Telinipara. He knew an important landmark. The nearest railway station was not in British territory, but in Chandernagore, the French outpost in the east, some thirty miles upstream from Calcutta.
After cremating his father, the last in the family to die, Prayaag climbed onto a train and slept on the floor of the compartment. The ticket collector left him alone. Sleep was Prayaag’s only nourishment. It was dark when he got off at Chandernagore. Determination took him to his destination. A long journey ended in a scrawl of mud roads beyond which lay the huge iron doors of the Victoria Jute Mill, a blur of green paint between thick walls.
He collapsed against a tin sheet. He was fortunate that the sheet was the door of a tea shop, and therefore opened at four in the morning, when a blast from the high chimney told workers to prepare for the first shift. He might or might not have survived till sunrise. The owner of the tea shop, Wali Mohammad, like the ticket collector, was not demonstrative, but retained a stony sympathy for the wrecks of famine. He gave Prayaag a couple of baked biscuits, tea and a mat to sleep on before his wife, Diljan Bibi, fed him a meal of rice and dal. Then he gave Prayaag work, washing dishes.
Later, perhaps much later, whispers suggested that a