Like many born in Punjab, I have grown up quite exposed to ‘covert’ communalist propaganda - be it in the form of distorted retellings of the violence in 1947 and 1984, or the not-so-subtle dog-whistling that bares itself in political campaigns. However, my parents’ fairly diverse friend circles, and their general inhibition from engaging in anything outright political, meant that this propaganda was often disrupted in some meaningful ways.
Well, at least, partly.
Filling an Experiential Void
You see, in comparison to Sikhs or Hindus, Punjab has a very minuscule proportion of Muslims (~1-2%). This little detail meant that in my gullible teenage years, this communalist propaganda directed at me, and its antidote (i.e. the communities I’ve grown up with), have always centred the animosity between those two major religions. Moreover, exposure to the lives of so many Sikh friends in school meant that my perception towards Sikhism remained positive and understanding.
In contrast, my exposure to anti-Muslim communalism (and its antidotes) always occurred distantly, with nothing credible or personal to look at, for responses and clarifications. Sure, I had my grandfather, a post-partition child whose opinions became extremely clear after 2014, but calling him a credible primary source would be an overstatement. Given my parents’ disinterest in dispelling this information, my lack of Muslim friends or neighbours, and my Arya Samaji ‘apolitical’ school, I mainly relied on the worlds of books and social media, which, in its early days, was still perfecting its hate-spewing algorithms.
Since then, I have, of course, grown in other ways, and have tried to study the systems, and not just the individuals, that feed this vitriolic hatred between the two communities. For me, then, City on Fire is the perfect concoction of these two modes of analysis. Through his poetic prose, Zeyad combines the individual - personified by his own life as a Muslim boy in one of Aligarh’s ghettos along with the lives of his parents, siblings, and friends - and the systemic - underlined by his focus on the cyclical nature of communal violence, the role of political capital, and the material incentives that drive both rioting and peace.
For me, then, City on Fire acted as another distant bookish friend, whose opinions and lived experiences now form a core part of how I perceive Islamophobia in this country. At the very least, it is a must-read for anyone who wishes to understand the long-term effects of sustained communalism on a community whose history and memory are marred with instances of grief, pain, othering and loss.
Branding and Narrative Building
In her book ‘Doppelganger’, Naomi Klein talks about self-branding in the age of social media and how the monetary incentives that permeate today’s attention economies force people to create a virtual replica of themselves, a distorted version that caters to the same incentives. I can’t look at our country’s state and not make a cultural comparison with this idea of branding. As the recent past has shown, India’s last decade has been a masterclass in re-packaging a fascist ideology to seem patriotic. More specifically, though, the use of popular culture, especially Bollywood, to blur the lines between nationalism and fascism, has become all the more prevalent. If nothing else, the last decade has ingrained in me the importance of narratives in building a movement.
City on Fire, by definition, is a counter-narrative. Being an autobiographical account of utmost honesty, clarity, and simplicity, it provides an alternative perspective to empathise with the communities that we are taught to hate. To clarify, I do not think of it as a telling of a person’s life story. To me, it is the telling of a people’s life story. By generously (and a little overwhelmingly :P) relying on metaphors and analogies, Zeyad guides you through the dingy and cluttered streets of Aligarh’s Upar Kot. He introduces you to the histories, the stories, and the aspirations of those who inhabit these streets, always making sure that you also know a little about who preceded them. In this way, the book conveys a sense of historical weight in each one of its observations.
In addition to his patience with his readers, Zeyad’s gripping and moving style of writing is what, according to me, makes City on Fire a rather successful counter-narrative. As someone who clearly understands the power that his words hold, he makes sure that he wields this power in a way that keeps you engrossed. For instance, in depicting how normalised the cycle of violence in Aligarh was, Zeyad chooses the local market as a very telling metaphor to convey his thoughts in this beautiful paragraph:
“The markets provided the anonymity to kill. It was where mobs could hide in narrow gullies and shoot down passing motorcycles or bearded businessmen - easy killings, less trouble. Like a sinner looking for penance, the markets were also what brought normalcy back. In Aligarh, the financial dependency that Hindus and Muslims have on each other is a kind of safety valve. When traders suffered losses during curfews, they forgot about revenge and the wounded town limped back to normalcy.”
Building an Optimistic Vision for Change
Chapters, which shed light on the turbulent and sustained violence faced by those who grow up under constant communal tension, are, often, interspersed with others that convey the basic joys of growing up - Zeyad’s interest towards comics and video games being the two foremost examples. For one, this strategy allows the readers a moment of calm and nostalgia between tension-filled stories and recollections of a traumatised childhood. However, I also see this process as a way to expose the readers to the same emotional volatility that Zeyad, himself, grew up in. If that is, indeed, the case, then his choice for the book’s conclusion is heartfelt and revealing.
After spending 19 chapters exposing his readers to the grief, the tension, and the turbulence of his life, Zeyad chooses the 20th to drive home a point that seems almost too obvious to talk about. To douse a city that is currently burning under the fire of hatred and intergenerational trauma, he calls for rainfall. “Not the ordinary kind”, though, he ties it together for us, in the book’s last few pages:
“It is the rain of forgiveness, falling from the skies, washing away the stains of resentment and bitterness that have poisoned our souls for far too long. The rain of coexistence, in whose embrace we acknowledge that we all dwell within the same darkness, recognising that there is no singular truth and that our fates are intertwined. The rain of compassion, melting away the walls of anger guarding our hearts, each drop eroding the barriers that separate us. The rain of empathy that enables us to feel the weight of others’ sorrows as intensely as we feel our own, dissolving the indifference of being aloof from the misery of others. The rain of respect that reminds us that we are but fragments of a greater mosaic, each carrying a story that can never be fully understood by another.”
While these acts, of forgiveness, coexistence, compassion, empathy, and respect are important in their own right, I am left imagining what a mass movement around these values would look like. Here, too, I see the same tension between the individual (with these values, on one side) and the system (with concepts of justice and rights, on the other) but, unfortunately, the book does not quite resolve this tension for us.
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In any case, I got to this book during my trip to Jaipur, yet another city with its violent history of communal conflict and tension, and reading Zeyad’s experiences in this environment only amplified the impact of his work on me. Warring and rioting based on one’s faith is not a new concept in our relatively short history, and City on Fire occupies an integral location as a moving piece of storytelling that gives us a revealing glimpse into the lives of those who live within this turmoil.
The book has been published by Harper Collins India. Follow them on YKA here.