Geetanjali Shree’s first Hindi novel, Hamara Shahar, Us Baras; 1998; in Daisy Rockwell’s translation, Our City That Year (India Hamish Hamilton, August 2024); brings to world literature an amazingly specific yet uncannily universal story that is all the more relevant today. The novel is a marvellously nuanced study of the ways in which chest thumping communal discourses insinuate into our personal spaces.
The best of us get pitted into camps and normalise the corrosion of our own souls. The novel brings out the self-estrangement of the protagonists as their polyvalent identities mutate from something organic, changeable and fragrant like a madhumalati vine into an unyielding, deterministic and arbitrary category like community, class, religion.
Written in the form of an eyewitness account of an unnamed narrator who is not a writer, but someone simply copying everything down, the novel dwells on the lives of a group of friends whose relatively secure day to day lives unravel when communal tensions rise in their city.
Hanif, a professor of history and his begum, Shruti, a short story writer – are tenants in the merry and wise Daddu’s house. Daddu’s son, Sharad, is Hanif’s friend and colleague at the University. A Devi math hidden behind ber bushes lies across the road from their house, separated from the University they work in only by a playground.
Our city that year, written by Geetanjali Shree, translated from Hindi by Daisy Rockwell.
But that year, the Devi math starts getting taller, louder; belligerently exhorting Hindu devotees to man up and seek revenge. In response, mosques up their volume. Namaz on the playground is banned in response.
The laughter and peace of the household is now sliced by bizarre discourses constantly streaming in from the loudspeakers. Three of the friends are writers. Sharad writes articles for newspapers, Shruti, stories and Hanif pens articles and consciousness raising leaflets and gives talks in colleges in small towns.
As tensions rise, Sharad tries to look at ‘both sides;’ Hanif increasingly withdraws into himself, feeling silenced. Shruti knows she must write, but is caught in a perpetual dilemma. Will writing about what’s happening be akin to fattening one’s prose on the misery of others? What about aesthetics? What about facts? She has never even witnessed a corpse.
The non-divisive, articulate protagonists tie themselves up in knots, throw their hands up and find that they are unable to write much. They discuss ways and means, pros and cons and make weak jokes to lift up their spirits. But only Daddu’s irreverent laughter relieves their stasis. Daddu, whose first tongue was Urdu, who quotes Ghalib and Rumi, and for whom the city’s composite culture is not some ideological dream, but a lived truth.
For how long can Daddu’s easygoing jokes go on?
When riots occur, followed by police action followed by wild threats followed by muscle flexing by the math followed by panicked rumours followed by bomb blasts followed by burnings followed by letter threats followed by name-calling; everyone in the city gets sucked into blame fixing, us versus them debates, leaning into their religious identity.
Even Sharad and Hanif start bickering. Sharad, who’s trying to ‘help’ Hanif, the celebrated professor, whose Muslim identity now stands in the way of his headship of the department; starts blaming him for ‘taking everything personally.’
If even educated Hindus are expressing animosity, ‘there must be some basis,’ says Sharad. ‘How besieged the Muslims must feel in a city where even educated Hindus express such hate,’ asks Shruti. Babu painter, the pragmatic Muslim newspaper man suggests that Sharad and Hanif should print their articles anonymously lest their views are conflated with their religions.
When riots break out, Sharad’s old classmate, the openly partisan policeman Kapadia, assures them that their part of the city is safe; but also tells Sharad to shave off his beard lest he gets mistaken for Hanif. Shruti dies of fear every time Hanif steps out or doesn’t return on time; but cannot communicate this to Hanif.
None of them mean to hurt one another, but so raw are nerves that they end up doing just that. Silence, anger, fear strangle their laughter. Unlike the riot-affected masses across the river, they know and understand how history and politics work, yet are mute spectators to the theft of their selfhood.
The unnamed narrator who pens down this, is no columnist, academic, story writer. She makes it her task to capture everything: terse conversations, tired jokes, forced laughter, the speeches of the Mahants, the gloating of the secretly thrilled policeman Kapadia, Daddu’s anecdotes from a time when differences added flavour to life, his child-like laughter, the grim news streaming in from riot-hit narrow lanes across the river, the rising death toll, Shruti’s constant fear, Hanif’s bitter laughter, the ugliness of departmental politics realigning on religious lines in the University, the arguments provoked by this. There is an urgency to her transcription.
Not trying to make sense, she worries only that the ink pot stay open and full so that the task of copying everything down faithfully is not interrupted. She understands that the unspeakability within and around them needs language.
The device of the naïve narrator gives Geetanjali Shree an amazing flexibility to weave events, emotions, conversations, even stray lines separated only by white space, into a single fabric. The narrative ricochets from paranoia to silent fear to hearty laughter to anxiety-filled conversations with visitors to silence-ridden intimacies against the backdrop of loudspeakers or television news.
Even an everyday activity like stirring a kadhai full of gajar halwa is riddled with fear and waiting. The constantly turning shards of everyday brilliantly echo a splintered reality. The reader can feel the collective schizophrenia overtaking the city. This also evokes the bewilderment and exhaustion of the protagonists under the non-stop barrage of communal incidents to make sense of.
There are repeated meditations on the task of the writer. Bearing witness to how conversations break down, laughter dies, sensible words disappear as the sinister takes over is all important for the narrator. Writing about collective trauma is not a contest for good writing, of getting down everything right, but of telling the truth.
But what is truth? At another point, Shruti, the writer, tells Sharad to tone down his reports—to not embroider his language with satire to reveal his progressive stance.
At a meta level, this novel captures the struggle to articulate when facts are versions; myths, truths. The ‘two sides’ analysis grants victimhood to aggressors by holding the victims responsible for violence heaped on them.
The ‘copying’ narrator drives home the point that at times like these, the intellect must sit down for individual experiential truths to come out. To write the rupture requires using the rupture itself to find a way to write – or transcribe – what’s happening.
Geetanjali Shree’s linguistic cosmopolitanism is reflected in her sonorous, dynamic Hindi, always hand-in hand with Urdu, rippling with crisp, cryptic organic tadbhav-rich usages from a half a dozen bolis, soundly demolishing any notion of Hindi as a Hindu tongue or Urdu as a Muslim tongue. If language is culture, the Urdu couplets, fragments of classical songs, film songs in the text mirror that.
Daisy Rockwell’s translation brims with heart and craft. She respects the linguistic complexity of the original. The translation successfully recreates the frantic, inchoate sense of exhaustion, the silences and deflections embedded in the Hindi text. Whether translating a cryptic leaflet from Bakrid 1917; or illustrating the way Hanif Zaidi, who is not a Lucknow wala but from Jhunjhunu, utters the Z without a nuqta, the linguistic and stylistic peculiarities of the original shine through.
The novelistic city caught in an epidemic of communal hate ‘that year’ could be any city today, senselessly gorging itself on simplistic stories of false pride and righteous revenge, oblivious to the centuries of composite culture it grew and prospered on. Placing the vocabulary of violent victimhood alongside the irreversible losses and silences unsettles the reader. Our City That Year is an essential read to understand our times.
