Introduction to Curfew in the City/*/

by C. M. Naim
 

During 1947, as the independent nations of Pakistan and India appeared on the political map of the world, violence in the name of religion reached unprecedented magnitude in South Asia. It abated considerably in the Fifties, but since then has steadily grown worse. In Pakistan, where non-Muslims were too few to matter much, Muslim communal passion was first directed against the Ahmadi Muslims, but gradually took on more varied ethnic and sectarian dimensions, pitting the Deobandis against the Barelavis, the Sunnis against the Shi’ahs, the Sindhis against the Muhajirs, and so on. More recently, however, even the minuscule Christian and Hindu populations in Punjab and Sindh have become its victims. In Bangladesh, with its still substantial non-Muslim population, anti-Hindu and anti-Chakma actions by the Muslim majority and by the state itself, have continued without much relief. And in India, where the Muslim minority is large enough to account for almost twelve percent of the population, the phrase “communal riots” has come to be an euphemism for anti-Muslim pogroms directed by certain elements in the majority Hindu community—with the encouragement, even active participation, of those very agencies of the state that are expected to protect the victims. Jabalpur, Jamshedpur, Muradabad, Bhiwandi, Hashimpura and Maliana, Bhagalpur, Baroda and Ahmedabad, and most recently Surat and Bombay of 1993—these are only the most haunting signposts on India’s path of steady decline as a civil polity. To which list we should also add Delhi and Kanpur in the dark days of 1984, when similar pogroms were directed against the Sikhs.

In response to the communal violence at the time of the Partition, a massive body of literature was produced in Bengali, Hindi, Punjabi and—what I directly know—Urdu. Urdu writers on both sides of the new international border produced countless short stories and several novels about those times. One critical issue they faced was: how does one create a piece of fiction about a reality so horrible? Some responded by doing a ‘balancing act’—if five victims of one religious persuasion were mentioned in the beginning, they were matched by five victims belonging to the other religion at the end. Some also felt that to bring the warring communities together they must put the final blame on a common enemy: the erstwhile colonial rulers. Other writers wrote as partisans; they saw their own community as being only a victim, and blamed the other community for being the exclusive perpetrator of violence. Most of these writings emphasized the ‘magnitude’ of the violence—the killings, the rapes, the destruction of property, the uprooting of populations. Only a small corpus explored the truly horrific—the casual betrayals, the meanness and cruelty in seemingly ordinary acts, the human capacity to routinize inhumanity—the evil in the ‘banal’. Sa’adat Hasan Manto in his stories of the Partition riots neither blamed any one group nor tried to distribute the blame equally. His significance and the lasting power of his stories lie in his focusing on those moments when a man, despite having done horrible things, could be shown as being still capable of doing ordinary little things. This strategy did not lessen the horror of the man’s actions; in fact, it enhanced it by making them the acts of someone not unlike us. At the same time, it made it possible to envision some hope, some capacity in mankind that could be harnessed to fight against such horrors.

The hatred and violence of 1947 was blamed by most writers at the time on the machinations of our erstwhile colonial rulers. Almost all of them felt that to bring the Hindus and Muslims together they had to find a common enemy in the English. But the events in the 70s and the 80s are different. We must face the fact that ‘the enemy is us’. To my knowledge, literary responses to contemporary communal violence in the sub-continent have not been extensive in any of the three countries and their many languages. For example, in Urdu in India, there are any number of short stories and poems about the present plight of the Muslims, but there are no major novels, anthologies or special issues of magazines. Likewise, I know of no work of imagination in Urdu from Pakistan that tries to explore the trajectory that communal violence has taken there.

In fact, in the sub-continental perspective, one can cite only two books that have made significant impact in this area: Lajja (“Shame”) in Bengali, by the Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasrin, and Shahar Mein Karfiyu (“Curfew in the City”) in Hindi, by Vibhuti Narain Rai. Nasrin’s book gained immediate notice in South Asia and abroad due to the fatwa issued against the author. Rai’s book has remained much less known even in India, though it did generate the wrath of some votaries of Hindutva, who successfully prevented it from being made into a film. Both Nasrin and Rai have written about the persecution of minority communities by the majority communities to which they themselves belong in their respective countries. Otherwise, the two books are very different.

Nasrin’s linear narrative covers thirteen days in the life a Hindu family in Dhaka in 1992 with considerable speed and passion; it also contains lengthy segments of a purely documentary nature. The latter generally dismayed the reviewers in Bangladesh and India. But the novelist Amitav Ghosh more accurately understood the aims of Nasrin’s narrative when he wrote in The Telegraph of 24 June 1994: “...taken on its own terms, the book’s strength can be seen to lie precisely in what appear to be its formal weakness. In its breakneck urgency, its direct and unembellished  Bengali prose, in the narrative inseparability of its fictional and documentary material, in its polemical repetitiveness and its undisguised emotional immediacy.” He then went on to compare Nasrin with the Egyptian feminist Nawal El Saadawy, and argued that the two “have pioneered one of the most powerful forms of our times. The polemiction—polemical fictions that are perhaps the most appropriate possible literary response to the oppressive banality of contemporary religious extremism.” In another way too, these documentary sections are exactly what makes Lajja so significant. They give names and professions and homes of those who otherwise get mentioned only as anonymous statistics. Nasrin wishes us not to forget those ordinary details that make these victims of communal fanaticism not unlike their enemies—in the end, so like us.

Rai’s novella is not ‘polemiction’.  It is, in fact, quite modest in ambition and execution. Though begun in 1980, in reposnse to a riot in Allahabad that he personally observed as the Senior Superintendent of Police there, the book came out only in 1988. Its episodic narrative covers three days in the life of a small neighborhood in Allahabad under the grip of a curfew during the riot. Divided into nine short chapters, it alternates between the story of Sayeeda, the wife of a bidi-maker, and her family, claustrophobic in effect in being confined to their one-room house; and other simultaneous events that take place elsewhere. That ‘elsewhere’ is spatially more open and varied, but—affected by the curfew—equally distorted and horrifying. The two progressions meet in the penultimate chapter, where a police party conducts ‘searches’ in Muslim homes—the home of a nationalist lawyer, Sayeeda’s home, and the palatial compound of the Haji. At the end of the book, the curfew continues.
Despite a few instances of authorial interventions, Rai seems to strive for a cool, sometimes ironic and detached voice. Nevertheless, he too wants us to come close to the victims of violence and persecution through our knowledge of their ordinariness. Thus Sayeeda, perhaps the central character in his novella, is not just a grief-stricken mother whose baby daughter dies during the curfew but also a rural person who hates using the latrine in her new home in the city.

Rai’s narrative is not about the ‘riot’ itself, or rather it is not about the killing and pillaging and raping, the events that were very much the focus of the narratives of the stories that were written about the riots of 1946 and 1947. It is not a story of people gone barbaric in the heat of a moment of passion or revenge. It is about cold, calculated greed and blind, senseless hatred.
Consider the chapter of ‘rape’. One may say that Rai is being too artful. The girl remains without a name, so do her assailants. But consider what has been told implicitly. Her family has the values that encourage education for girls, but not the resources to maintain those values safely. Her mother sews clothes for a dealer; she has to look after her younger siblings and do all the housework. She has an ‘affair’ with a young man from her neighborhood, but we are told what inevitably happened in such ‘affairs’. She is knitting a sweater for the boy from some worn and discarded wool. He hopes to buy her a shawl by taking out some money from the little he earns and —according to his values—must put in his mother’s hands. Theirs is not a romance that would shake the world, not something that bards will sing about. The girls goes to school on the fateful day, against the wishes of her mother; the boy does not stir out, obedient to his mother’s command. The girl is also abandoned by the school authorities who make no effort to send the girls home in safety. (But did they have the needed resources?) Running in panic, the girl finds herself in a lane that—in her panic—looks strange to her but is in fact not far from her own alley. There, three men, themselves hiding for safety in their milling shop, drag her inside and rape her. She calls them bhaiya (“brothers”), they call themselves “sister-fuckers.” The incident is seen by others, but no one comes to the girl’s help. Fearful, they are themselves cowering in their meager homes. In a milieu where a name indicates the person’s religion and much more, Rai has a clear purpose in keeping the victim and the assailants nameless.

More complex but similar in intentions is the chapter with Devi Lal, the neighborhood drunk. Here we are told that the lane is ‘Hindu’. Of course, its physical condition turns out to be not much different from the neighboring ‘Muslim’ lane—they perhaps share the same filthy, open sewer. But in the ‘Hindu’ lane, the residents are free to move. Stragglers come home, bringing incredible tales of Muslim atrocities. Gossip flows. The local drunk gains a respectability that he had not known before. Then a police party arrives; it demands and receives hospitality from the residents. The children who had earlier shouted a comic doggerel about Devi Lal, now run around shouting a slogan declaring solidarity between the police and the Hindus, making the Muslims their common enemy. Meanwhile, a different, more ordinary drama has been going on at one end of the lane, where some of the local Lotharios are waiting to flirt with the daughters of the only local Muslim resident, a tailor. Their impatience makes them throw a rock at the tailor’s door. The noise causes a general panic. When the truth dawns on the elders of the lane they suddenly become aware of the tailor’s presence in their midst. They want to reassure him but he never opens his door. Then they recall that he always did that in every previous riot. Now the children take up another slogan, left over from the elections held not too long ago, and turn it into a declaration of solidarity with the tailor, Yusuf.

Most of the narrative is about the death and burial of Sayeeda’s daughter. The little girl dies of cholera, but she also dies because she couldn’t get proper medicine, because she lived in terrible conditions where survival was almost impossible. She died, as had so many other children in that family and in that neighborhood. But the curfew that deprived her of better medical treatment, now almost deprives her of a proper burial. Her grandfather has to risk his body, even life, to go and get curfew passes to take the dead body to the graveyard in the morning. Her grandmother has to take similar risks to bring water from the public tap in order to wash the corpse. In fact, the tiny corpse barely escapes being crushed under the boots of a police party that is going around ‘doing searches’ for weapons.

The riot itself is not mentioned at all. There is only the briefest mention of some small explosive device being thrown against a temple wall that causes no damage. But immediately the existing fears and suspicions take over, a curfew is imposed by the authorities, and the city becomes divided into ‘Muslim’ and ‘Hindu’ neighborhoods.

The narrative focuses on how the curfew affects the simple, mundane matters in the lives of ordinary people: a sick child cannot get medicine; a family cannot get drinking water; a girl cannot walk down the street in safety; people cannot even stay indoor in security; a dead child cannot easily be given a decent burial. But political and civic leaders and journalists and authorities go on living their lives of privilege. They do not lose their privileges. The under-privileged are denied even the little they had. There is a nexus of interests between the leaders, the journalists, and authorities.

The role of the police and the PAC is separated from that of the BSF and the army, as has often been mentioned in the narratives of the victims of riots in the past. The police is shown to contain blatantly communal personnel, both in high and low positions.  There seems to be no Muslim in the bureaucracy, civil or police. Also missing are ideologues and rabble rousers of the type often mentioned with reference to communalistic political parties. But their presence is felt in the background. We see the authorities in action as they conduct searches and hold a peace committee meeting. The flagrant criminality of the searches is in marked contrast to the utter hypocrisy and self-serving of the peace committee proceedings. We know that both activities will be reported in the official record as well as in the journalists’ accounts, but not the way the author has shown them.
It is not an ambitious book. One may even call it slight. Hindi literary critic pointed out its journalistic quality. The author himself was not unaware of it. In an interview in 1991, he remarked, “I concede that it appears to be more a piece of reportage than fiction proper—reflective and contemplative. In part this is a consequence of haste, but it was also deliberate. I wanted it to assume a certain form. I should like to think, however, that given more time and effort [it] would have become a better work of art.”

What, nevertheless, makes it deserving of our fullest attention is one simple fact: in this novel, the author and the citizen have become one. Also, it is, after all, an insider’s narrative. This is not a left-handed compliment. In a society where literacy is not so common, where citizens of India have fought in two world wars and at least three other wars but have yet to produce one novel, one poem written by someone who actually went through those wars, where hardly any bureaucrat or academician or doctor has produced a book of imaginative literature dealing with his particular profession or milieu, we should be grateful that now a police officer has written a novel about something which involved him professionally. He remembered what he saw. That is the main thing. Forgetfulness is the worst crime in these times when history and memory are both being suppressed or distorted for instant gratification of the worst kind—and at a cost to those who have remained unmentioned in conventional chronicles, or mentioned only as statistics, nameless, even bodiless.

The book went through two editions in three years, and in March 1991 a journalist in Allahabad announced his plans to make a feature film based on it. It was this announcement that brought forth a “fatwa” from Shri Ashok Singhal, the Secretary-General of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad. Not surprisingly, he had not even bothered to read the book, for he advised Mr. Rai to resign from the government service before publishing his book. More effectively, he threatened to burn down any cinema house that would dare to show the proposed film. Though Hindi literati came out in full force to denounce the threat, the film was never made.

In conclusion, it is worth noting that Rai, after finishing the novel, did not complacently sit back. Instead, he took time out from his professional work to do research on the violent behavior of the police in Indian civil life as a whole. It should also be noted with some satisfaction that his research was supported by the National Police Academy. Some of his findings and reflections are included in the afterword he specially wrote for this book.

--May 1, 1996

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/*/ Vibhuti Narain Rai, Curfew in the City, translated with an introduction by C. M. Naim (New Delhi: Rolli Books, 1998), pp 7–16.