Review: History’s Angel by Anjum Hasan
Set in 2019 leading up to the citizenship bill protests, History’s Angel is about the life and anxieties of a Muslim schoolteacher in Delhi
Ahmed Ali’s Twilight in Delhi (1940) was the first significant Muslim novel to be published in English. It’s about a family in old Delhi during the first two decades of the 20th century depicting a national, political and cultural decay and its impact on the lives of Indian Muslims. It was seeped in nostalgia — for the Mughal past of the city before the British, for Persian and Urdu poetry.
In the decades since, there have been only a handful of notable Delhi novels. There aren’t too many on the lived Muslim experience in Indian English writing, and there aren’t enough good modern Indian middle-class family novels either.
Anjum Hasan’s new novel History’s Angel is all of these things. It’s about the life and anxieties of a Muslim schoolteacher in Delhi and his family — set in 2019 leading up to the citizenship bill protests. Its excellent cast of characters are drawn out with incisive clarity and wit. The city too is described perfectly with its neighbourhoods — old Delhi, Okhla, Jamia Nagar, Mehrauli, Noida — leaping out like minor characters as its protagonist wanders through them.
Alif is the quintessential Purani Dilli man who lives with his head in the clouds of the past. He teaches history and it is all he thinks about; it’s all he talks about; and it takes up half the novel.
The meat is in the other half.
Alif’s wife, for instance. Tahira is ambitious and acerbic. She works long hours at a supermarket while pursuing an MBA.
“Tahira dislikes the assumption that because she is Muslim and a woman she must be a great cook. Her colleagues at the supermarket treat her, whenever Eid comes around, as a source of biryani and kababs, an expectation that raises her hackles sky high.‘Is this all we are?’ she asks Alif.‘Bawarchis? Poetry-spouting fools with minced mutton coming out of our ears, thinking only of Allah and pining only for bahisht between mouthfuls of zafrani pulao?’”
A major source of contention between couples in Old Delhi is Old Delhi itself: So Alif is attached to the “smallest floral detail in a lintel” and Tahira can’t wait to, is determined to, move out.
But not to her in-laws’ in Jamia Nagar. Alif’s father Mahtab is a retired cop who barely ever stepped inside the kitchen but distracts himself from the news by watching cooking shows. His mother Shagufta, a paramedic, clucks over the suffering of women (whose life she is determined to improve) and small girls in headscarves, a “new sartorial epidemic” she neither approves of nor understands.
The question blares on TV: “What does it mean, sir, to be a Muslim in contemporary India?” and Hasan shows her characters engaging with it, the idea of Muslimness, in the distressing contemporary climate.
Alif’s cousin Mir, a journalist, rues how, less than a hundred years ago, “we were writers with pens of fire, we were brilliant socialists – think Faiz, think Manto – dreaming of world revolution… Now we write scared books about being mistaken for terrorists and about our children being mocked in school.” Ahmad, who works at Mahtab and Shagufta’s house, has been dreaming about Babri Masjid, suffering for not “putting my forehead on the walls of that mosque so that they’d have to kill me first to get to it” — and determined to take a loan to go on pilgrimage to Mecca.
And, “In recent years Alif has had to eat his biryani always anxious that his wife and his father might approach rudeness over that burning topic, the only one they ever discuss – Muslims. It’s always Muslims they talk about – people who are them but also not them, a body of sufferers out there regarding whose suffering these two have come up with completely different diagnoses.”
His aunt Amina thinks none of this is new and brings up the Prophet’s whole clan, which was boycotted by his tribesmen, the Quraysh. “Is that not the same thing?”
In the past five or so years, a variety of experiences of Indian Muslims have been explored in non-fiction: Neyaz Farooquee’s An Ordinary Man’s Guide to Radicalism; Nazia Erum’s Mothering a Muslim; Ghazala Wahab’s Born a Muslim: Some Truths about Islam; Salman Khurshid’s At Home in India: The Muslim Saga. More are underway. In 2019, Annie Zaidi wrote about the anxieties of rising nationalism in her excellent debut novel Prelude to a Riot.
In an interview on her publisher’s website, Hasan has said she “wanted to write a novel about what this might feel like on the inside…where joy in a new pair of shoes can override bad news politically, and where ambivalence is as strong a force as despair.” In this, she is successful. History’s Angel is an important book. It is a counter to disinformation and historical distortion, and a novelised record of our times.
It is also a busy novel; there’s a lot else happening in it. Alif’s job is in peril because the new principal has taken offence to, among other things, “bringing too much Muslim history into this school.” He spends his free time drinking with his best friend Ganesh and daydreaming about an old crush they’ve gotten back in touch with. There’s his cousin’s swanky new shoe store, his son, his colleagues and students, an old professor, potential landlords, Ganesh’s parents. Every character in the novel is intriguing and tackled with humour, compassion and precision. But none of them gets enough space. It’s taken up by kings, saints, philosophers and poets. Hundreds of men dug up from thousands of years of history of India and beyond. Everything transports Alif back in time and makes him ponder over some historical figure or event. When he isn’t thinking about it, he’s engaged in a historical or philosophical debate with one of the other characters in the novel.
History is the heavyweight and it hangs over everything. That may well have been the intention – history as a character, sure, but it feels more like a crutch. The philosophising, the contemplation, the poetry, the romance and the nostalgia is too digressive. It all comes in the way of the narrative.
Each part of Hasan’s novel is terrific on its own, the characters are compelling, the setting painfully accurate and the sentences shine. Ultimately, though, it feels too stiff; like a semi-novel or a composition glued together by history, too much history, encyclopaedic insertions of history.
I thought of what Rushdie’s Saleem Sinai said in Midnight’s Children, “Is this an Indian disease, this urge to encapsulate the whole of reality?”
Saudamini Jain is an independent journalist. She lives in New Delhi.