Review: City on Fire; A Boyhood in Aligarh by Zeyad Masroor Khan
Zeyad Masroor Khan’s book may be placed in the genre of liberal Muslim autobiographical non-fiction intended to alert the majority to the sense of alienation felt by the minority
“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Tolstoy’s famous line from Anna Karenina seems apt to comment on the place that the ghettoized Indian Muslim holds in Bharat today. In City on Fire, Zeyad Masroor Khan tells us his story of growing up in the prone-to-riots, historic ghetto of Upar Kot in Aligarh (now Harigarh), his migration to Delhi, where he studied and lived for 10 years, building a career as a journalist, and his subsequent return to Aligarh to write this autobiographical narrative following the north-east Delhi riots of 2020. The transformation of Aligarh to Harigarh mirrors the evolution of India into Bharat.
I too grew up in the ghetto (of Shahjehanabad), albeit in the capital city. Consequently, as a liberal millennial Muslim professional, many of the experiences, observations, and critiques of an increasingly-Hindutva-led India that Khan provides read all too familiar, with variation of detail, not essence. Our experiences differ in the relative degree of direct violence seen or borne, but the feelings and everyday humiliations that new India evokes in the mind of the minority are shared: the discrimination that’s common for Indian Muslim children at private schools, and the need to second-guess where the next jibe, insult, instance of discrimination, or threat to violence may come from. Since 1984, in Delhi, rioting had been largely avoided during many of the once-a-decade (or more) cycles of violence as they erupted in UP, Gujarat, Bombay (Mumbai) and elsewhere in 1992 and 2002. The violence was always available for masochistic viewing on various media as the numbers of those killed from the minority were always much higher. But it is only in the last decade that the direct experience of riotous mobs came closer to my home with the 2020 violence and the building of tensions in Old Delhi. Khan’s experience was more immediate. His school bus was encircled by a mob near Upar Kot, and the Muslim children were saved by their Hindu conductor.
READ MORE: Interview: Zeyad Masroor Khan – “My relationship with faith is always oscillating”
City on Fire is strongest where it attempts a critical understanding of the violence, the riots, and its survival modes, especially in the mofussil ghetto (through secret alleyways and escape staircases known only to locals and neighbours) and the legitimate constant fears of the tenant-students of Jamia. Other parts where micro aggressions are mentioned – the liberal Muslim professional being told “But You Don’t Look Like a Muslim” (that has already been turned into a book title by Rakhshanda Jalil) – appear common place (to me). Khan’s book may be placed in the genre of liberal Muslim autobiographical non-fiction intended to alert the majority to the persecution and sense of alienation felt by the minority. The genre includes books such as Ghazala Wahab’s Born a Muslim and Ziya us Salam’s Being Muslim in Hindu India. Mohammed Amir’s co-authored autobiography Framed as a Terrorist was far more visceral. I hope (with some fatigue) that the majority may read these personal narratives of torn Muslim lives and learn to care through them in ways they don’t through the news cycle of lynchings and riots, and reports of discrimination and marginalization such as the now almost-forgotten Sachar Committee report or the work of organizations such as Aman Biradari, Karwan-e-Mohabbat, Sabrang, and Citizens for Justice and Peace. I had ranked another book in this genre, Farah Bashir’s Rumours of Spring: A Girlhood in Kashmir (2021), as one of the best reads of its year. Khan’s book lacks that strength of voice and falls short in terms of style and tone. Where Bashir’s representations were sensitive, evocative, deeply profound, and spoke of a mature interiority interrogating the (lost) formational innocence of her childhood, Khan’s story does not manage to find an interesting or convincing voice quite befitting his subject. The child Khan oscillates from overconfidence and excelling at school to impostor syndrome and lazy ways with gaming and comics tempered by flirtations with devout religion and its organizations such as the Tabligh. All of these may provide points of interest to the uninitiated but those looking for a mature reflection on the vagaries of life and childhood will find a garbled tone that does not distinguish between the world views of a child and its mature recounting from a journalist. For example, certain notions are presented as truisms in the book, such as Hindi as the language of Hindus and Urdu as the language of Muslims, or the idea that contraception is forbidden in Islam. These could be argued by students of language or religion to be false or requiring historical contextualisation. Khan does not write these with any evident irony or demarcation as the views of a child and/or ghettoised society that need not be universally accepted. Just as he shows, through the conductor, that not all Hindus are Islamophobic, he could have qualified statements about Muslims and Islam more carefully.
The publisher’s decision to compel readers to access all notes digitally through a QR code is also an irritant. These days, people buy and read paper books to get away from the digital — the glare of the screen, the short-attention span and hyperlinks of the online world. Basic information on paper would have helped the reader immerse himself in the book.
Too many endorsements these days are filled with hyperbole. Christophe Jaffrelot tells us, “No one else [apart from Khan] could have told us more effectively what it means to live in a ghetto,” without explaining in any way why he believes this to be the case.
City on Fire joins the list of contemporary Indian Muslim autobiographies and may be of value to those who wish to explore the Muslim ghetto. Having grown up in one, I did not find newness, a compelling voice, or great insight here.
Maaz Bin Bilal is an author and translator. He teaches at Jindal Global University.