City on Fire

Title: City on Fire – A Boyhood in Aligarh
Author: Zeyad Masroor Khan
Publisher: HarperCollins India, 2023 (First)
ISBN: 9789356998247
Pages: 294

In 2017, Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman vowed to make Saudi Arabia ‘a bastion of moderate Islam’. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan retorted that ‘Islam cannot be either moderate or non-moderate. Islam can only be one thing’. Of course, he didn’t specify which one. When a terrorist attack takes place, or more commonly when jihadist propaganda is loosened on social media, we wonder why the ‘moderate’ Muslims are silent or inactive in the face of effervescence on the extremists’ part. Instead of addressing the social evils associated with the community such as polygamy, arbitrary termination of marriages at the husband’s whim, discriminatory treatment of women in distribution of family property and a host of other such issues, the so-called moderates blame others for offending the hardliners through any real or imagined action. The true fact is that notions of religious supremacy and the desire to dominate over the other religions are what make the hardliners restless, but the moderates adroitly obfuscate it and loudly play the victim card to find justifications for the physical or ideological violence exerted by the jihadists. This leads us to conclude that Erdogan is, after all, quite right in what he said. This book from Zeyad Masroor Khan is about his life in Aligarh which is marked by frequent skirmishes and riots between the Hindu and Muslim communities. Khan finds the conditions repeated in Delhi as well where he worked as a journalist. The author is a journalist, writer and documentary film-maker based in New Delhi. He has worked with national and international media companies like Reuters, Vice, Brut and Deccan Herald. This is his first book.

Surprisingly for a native, Khan is unusually circumspect and subdued in extolling the legacy of Aligarh in deciding the destiny of the subcontinent. Aligarh was the epicentre of the Pakistan Movement and the nerve centre of the seditious campaign that ended up in the partition of the country. Jinnah and Liaquat Ali Khan were carried on the shoulders of students whenever they visited the Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) which was their intellectual headquarters. Yasmin Khan notes in her book ‘The Great Partition’ that there were student leaders in AMU who openly boasted to have killed Hindus in riots (read my review of ‘The Great Partition’ here). Aligarh Muslims voted en masse for the Muslim League and thronged in support to its policies. The polling data leaves no doubt on the total support the League enjoyed. But when Partition actually came, they chose to happily stay back in India. The author says that after Partition, his grandfather ‘believed in Gandhi and wanted to stay in a secular India’. The author also comments on the violent methods used by the Pakistan supporters: ‘riots were taking place, people were butchered on the streets, trains were robbed and houses set on fire’ (p.21). With this truculent past behind their back, Zeyad Khan is acting astonished that the Hindus were not on friendly terms with them after partition. Communal riots were very common in Aligarh. The book talks about secret electric switches wired in Muslim areas for sounding emergency alarms to quickly gather people for fighting the Hindus.

This book is thoroughly hostile to Hindus and contains unmitigated hatred towards them. All Hindus are straitjacketed to be antagonistic towards Muslims. Some quotes from the book would help to uncover the fangs of venom concealed in the text: “Even the Hindus respected Ishrat Bhai for his honesty” (p.31), “Even the Hindus here are nicer than those from other neighbourhoods” (p.12, speaking about Uparkot), “During riots, Rasool’s house was attacked first, even if they acted all friendly with their Hindu neighbours” (p.32), “In my dreams, I’d see Hindus entering my home and setting it ablaze” (p.247). Muslims living among Hindus on very friendly terms were said to be mercilessly and treacherously assaulted during riots. The constant refrain of the book is that Hindus cheat. If the word ‘Hindu’ was replaced by ‘Jew’, this book would’ve been proscribed as a classic case of anti-Semitism. Beneath all these charades, the author’s real intention to play the victim card on Muslims comes out in the open. Khan is also careful to distinguish Hindus into upper caste and rich businessmen, lower caste labourers who are as poor as Muslims and Dalits (p.14). This newfound sympathy for the oppressed is just another masquerade for cutting down the tall poppy rather than upliftment of the downtrodden. Whenever a riot occurs, it is the Hindu who is on the other side, without any subtle caste demarcations.

The extraordinary effort exerted by Khan in appearing temperamentally indistinguishable from a boy who grew up in the 1990s elsewhere would’ve been appreciable had it not been used for giving respectability to his sinister and vicious narrative. His interest in comic books as a child helped to foster his faculty in handling languages. But the places to access these books were in Hindu areas and Khan narrates going about these places in trepidation that the Hindus may attack him. On the other hand, comic books were considered ‘the pinnacle of wise’ in his family. Drawing or seeing pictures is frowned upon in Islam. Practising music also infuriated some of his family members. Muslim children dutifully attended local madrassas while the author enjoyed reading comic books in Hindu areas. The comics told the story of a detective duo Ram and Rahim who intervened to save the country from aggression. Even though these books thus carried the rudiments of secularism and living in a pluralistic society, the author is anguished that “Muslims were never the central characters in any comic books. They were only the sidekicks and villains, a trend that continued in almost all the ones I read” (p.66). That’s simply because most of the Muslim children didn’t read them! In the books they actually read at madrassas, infidels were the villains. You get heroes in books who appeal to the bulk of its readers. As years go by, Khan tries his best to look and sound like a regular, mainstream school-going boy interested in Cartoon channel and video games. His discusses about a lot of cartoon characters he found attractive on TV. At times, he appeals to reason, ridiculing Muslims’ belief in djinns and spirits. He even pretends to be rational, but beneath this thin veil lurks his poisonous divisive agenda of being victimized in spite of holding all these ‘modern’ habits and tastes. He even feigns that he didn’t know how to offer namaz though he joined the hard-line Tablighi Jamaat a few years later. Khan also confesses that Osama bin Laden was a hero for him after 9/11 and dreamed of the Arab terrorist defeating the US in Afghanistan and then taking over Pakistan and India. He also dreamed that it would lead to Islam’s domination over the whole world. All this is written in a half-humorous way designed to disarm sceptics who might not read the whole book and to wriggle himself free of allegations of vituperation. A careful scrutiny will expose the vicious payload of communal hatred cloaked under the blanket of superficial humour.

Khan’s reproduction of communal unrest in Aligarh is deviously and shamelessly partisan. It serves only to bolster the Left/Islamist propaganda that Muslims are scared to live in India. Such an argument strengthens only the anti-national narrative. Mindless exaggeration oozes out of assertions like “all people in Muslim neighbourhoods lived in anticipation of the bad times that were always round the corner”. Communal tension is said to be a part of existence for Muslims around which the lives of everyone were moulded. This book narrates fine details of violence in which Muslims got killed or injured. These are so one-sided and quoting abuses verbatim that they appear to be insinuations for taking revenge. Aligarh has a history of communal rioting going back several centuries but for the author it mysteriously starts only in 1984 following the build-up of the Ayodhya temple movement. The narrative maliciously and cleverly omits the Rushdie ‘Satanic Verses’ and Shah Bano agitations in which Muslims went on the rampage. At one point, the author is forced to admit that Hindus also were killed in the riots but he rues that they were “fewer in numbers than the Muslims” and makes a sneering comment that “these were small sacrifices to achieve larger goals” (p.172). All the violent scenes portrayed in the book appear to be concocted fantasies and they always take place ‘a few feet away from a police station’ where the policemen ignored appeals for help. On the other hand, he proudly describes how BJP leaders were killed in retaliation (p.180) who were suspected to be behind attacks on Muslims. Khan notes some curious characteristics of AMU professors. Most of them have an ancestral connection to nawabs, zamindars or rich families. Only a few have risen from underprivileged backgrounds. Most are anti-student and part of regional lobbies. Occasionally, there were professors who became goons themselves and carried country-made guns in their pockets (p.188). This confirms Yasmin Khan’s observations referred to in Para 2 above.

It is astonishing that the author maintains his sentiment of hate for most of the narrative. He has packed that much malice in this book. Many a times the readers vainly hope that the verbs and adjectives are being used in half-jest, but it’s not so. Like a guided missile evading and going around obstacles to home in on the target, Khan is very focussed and totally dedicated to deliver his communal payload even though sometimes he acts like a rationalist or a leftist. Any Muslim reading this book will naturally feel pain and get offended. This is quite expected as the story is carefully crafted to produce this effect. Only the last five pages of the book are free from spite. In fact, this portion which tells about the author’s long walks in Aligarh after abandoning his job in Delhi in the aftermath of Covid, is the only saving grace. Then the author observes Hindus living alongside Muslims – as if for the first time – and realizes that they too belong to the Homo sapiens species. Like a flash of lightning suddenly illuminating a dark landscape, his bigoted mind escapes its shackles for a brief moment to realize that ‘forgiveness, coexistence, compassion, empathy and respect’ are the characters which are required to be instilled in every person for a harmonious communal life in India. At this instant, the author acknowledges workers everywhere in the world for giving him hope through their resilience and courage. This looks like a weak strategic ploy to appear leftist rather than borne from any genuine conviction or empathy.

In the beginning of the book, Khan records that ‘slight exaggeration is an inextricable part of Aligarh’s culture. If somebody from Aligarh tells you a story, take it with a grain of salt’ (p.4). Readers are advised to keep this confession in mind while reading through the author’s communally prejudiced rant. However, the exaggeration in this book is not at all slight and you require a full chest of salt to make it palatable. The author has a western audience in mind, possibly of the NGO variety, while telling his story. Usual tropes of foreign authors in India such as pot-holed roads, open drains, nightly power outages, stench from drains and garbage accumulated in streets are mentioned many times for effect even though not exactly suited or even relevant in the context.

This book is a piece of Islamist propaganda and it’s astonishing why HarperCollins chose to publish it. The book is not at all recommended.

Some other books which features Aligarh in a prominent way and were reviewed earlier here are

a)    Aligarh’s First Generation by David Lelyveld (read review here)
b)    Separatism among Indian Muslims by Francis Robinson (read review here)
c)    The Great Partition by Yasmin Khan (read review here)

Rating: 1 Star