Yesterday I finished reading A Man from Motihari, a novel by Abdullah Khan, published recently by Penguin. I had picked up the book after going through its review in the Hindu.
The novel tells the gripping tale of a man from Motihari, the birthplace of the great English author George Orwell. Motihari is a small town situated about 150 kilometers north of Patna in Bihar, India. Interestingly this man named Aslam Sher Khan was born exactly in the same house where Orwell was born.
Aslam hails from a lower middle class family in Motihari. And it is due to his education that he rises the ladder of success. He gets a white collar job as a banker in a public sector bank. Moving from one Indian town to another for his job and receiving setbacks like divorce and separation from his daughter and family he reaches Los Angeles in the US where he meets Jessica, the love of his life. Jessica is a Hollywood actor.
Aslam’s story coincides with the story of today’s India. The novel is a document of the country’s political developments since the demolition of the Babri Masjid in the nineties. Aslam was only a child then. He observes the changes that are taking place in the country over the years. Being a Muslim he has himself been a victim of these changes on various occasions in his locality, office or other public places. Aslam is also a survivor of the Gujarat riots in 2002. He has had nightmarish experiences of those riots. It hurts him to see his secular country gradually turning into a theocratic state.
The novel seeks to reveal that Islam as a religion is not a monolith. It is a congregation of a large number of its followers divided into sects and subsects who may be at war with one another at various levels. These differences pop up in the story particularly during the love affair between Farooque and Mahrukh. Their love didn’t have the approval of Mahrukh’s family because Farooq Ansari was from a lower caste, a Julaha, while Mahrukh was from a higher caste. The novel also tries to depict that just as in other religions the majority of the people in Islam are peace loving.
Though the novel has been written from the perspective of its main character, Aslam Sher Khan, and it delves deeper into the undercurrents of his community and society, it also seeks to bust the stereotypes about Hindus and Christians through its characters and story.
It’s a strange coincidence that just before taking up this novel I had gone through a novel in Hindi titled Vaishalinama. And I feel tempted to convey that apart from the obvious difference in the language I observe a lot of similarities between the two. Both try to portray the problems of the contemporary age. A Man from Motihari deals with interreligious issues through a story of today, while Vaishalinama focuses on the inter caste ones through an allegorical story of the ancient age. They both try to show how some people can draw political power in a state by manufacturing false narratives. In one the narratives are about religions, in the other they are about castes.
However there is one stark difference between the two novels. In Vaishalinama the author Prabhat Praneet has the solution to the problems in the society but in A Man from Motihari the problems seem insoluble. I can understand the author Abdullah Khan’s predicament. Probably he wants to remain loyal to the reality of today.
We should feel happy, however, that in today’s post truth age when attempts are being made to manipulate and erase the facts of the past and the present the authors like Abdullah Khan and Prabhat Praneet are taking recourse to fiction to reveal those facts.
What a coincidence! Both the authors belonging to the same region of Bihar have written novels having similar themes and about the same time. One in Hindi and the other in English.
Arupedia 