Some decades after it was published, Ahmed Ali reflected on the genesis of his Twilight in Delhi, a novel dealing with the capital’s social climate in the early 20th century. “A tide of revolt led some of us to contemplate the state of inanity and indifference into which the social order had sunk,” felt Ali. “My purpose in writing the novel was to depict a phase of our national life and the decay of a whole culture, a particular mode of thought and living, values now dead and gone before our eyes.”‘History’s Angel,’ Anjum Hasan, Bloomsbury India, 2023.Anjum Hasan’s new novel, History’s Angel, seems inspired by a similar impulse. It is a calm, measured portrayal of a character whose Janus-like nature is to look backwards even as he is compelled to walk forwards. This is the mild-mannered Alif, a history schoolteacher who subjects every free moment to a historical test: “This is now but how was it back then? Or that was then but how does it matter now?”To his students, he tries to drive home “the difference between history and story” while being aware that “our stories are still swollen with the exaggerations that make some men impossibly broad-chested and lion-hearted and the rest just men”. During a school trip to Humayun’s Tomb, one of his pupils addresses him with a religious slur and, instinctively and uncharacteristically, Alif responds by reaching out and twisting his ear.The reverberations of this act are the framework for the rest of the novel. However, History’s Angel is not simply a linear progression of events: it is an informed exploration of Alif’s milieu, with his family and friends providing the necessary shades and contrasts for a portrayal of a cross-section of Muslims in north India today.Others on this spectrum of faith and hope include Alif’s wife Tahira, a store manager at a Karol Bagh supermarket who is studying for an MBA and whose weekends are given over to “that which makes the world go round, or so say Dale Carnegie and Steven Covey”. Their teenage son often puzzles Alif by his fascination with technology and the digital world, as does the attitude of his practical cousin, owner of a shoe store, who dreams of moving to the Emirates and urges Alif to manage the shop in his place.Further ripples on the surface of Alif’s existence arrive in the form of ups and downs in the tempestuous life of his close friend Ganesh, who is a bit too fond of the bottle. Ganesh nurtures feelings for an old school crush and, to his surprise, Alif finds himself feeling the same way.His ageing parents, meanwhile, do the best they can to survive in changing circumstances. Much of their time is spent in keeping tabs on relatives, friends, and their increasingly radicalised domestic help. The rest is spent in watching cooking shows and news on TV, with the latter inevitably posing the question: “What does it mean, sir, to be a Muslim in contemporary India?”Also read: No Country for Religious ConvertsTheir lives are suffused by a feeling that Orhan Pamuk once described as hüzün, a sense of melancholy. This, in his words, softens the view “like the condensation on a window when a teakettle has been spouting steam on a winter’s day”.Above and beyond these characters is the city of Delhi itself, which Hasan portrays in hues that alternate between the gaudy, the shop-worn and the materialistic. Her characters move through the teeming streets and residences of the old city, survey the grandeur of its monuments, and test themselves against the brashness of its ritzy malls and new habitations. Delhi, thinks Alif, is “the city on which the apocalypse descends every day and the city where the apocalypse is always awaited”.Illustration: Pariplab ChakrabortyMuch of this is extremely well done, in terms of immersing the reader in varieties of minority experience. In particular, there is the discomfiting scene of Alif and Tahira undergoing a derogatory interrogation while trying to rent a flat. At another time, we’re told that Tahira dislikes the assumption, especially during Eid, that because she is Muslim and a woman she must be a great cook. “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?”The flip side of this is that there are stretches in which very little happens from a novelistic point of view. Instead, History’s Angel relies on creating empathy through well-rounded characters to propel itself forward by sinuous sentences. Because Alif “would rather read The Discovery of India than discover India”, his complaisant nature isn’t entirely up to the job of sustaining the narrative.At one stage, Alif politely informs his overly patriotic school principal while breaking into a sweat that “there is no such thing as a Muslim history of India…try separating Muslims from Hindus in this way when you go into the past of this country and all you find are entanglements”. Though the idea of a national destiny frightens him, he has little choice “but to stay with the moderate hopes and incremental changes that democratic statehood offers till they come up with a better substitute for it, which no one has so far”.In such ways, he personifies the novel’s title, taken from Walter Benjamin’s conception of the angel of history, whose face is turned towards the past with the wreckage of catastrophe piled at his feet. The angel wants to restore what has been smashed but cannot, because his wings are entangled in the storm of progress that propels him forward.In her careful delineation of such a predicament, Anjum Hasan asks us to consider what is gained and what is lost in the face of this nationalistic storm. The novel is, to borrow from Susan Sontag, an education of the heart. Sanjay Sipahimalani is a Mumbai-based writer and reviewer.
