A writer who is both me and I am not, when asked what his book is about, he says the question he is asking is the following: Which of your neighbors will look the other way when you have A figure to the right will come to the door and put a boot on your face.
I’m talking about what happens in the first few pages of my recently published book, This time outside. The question raised by our narrator may make you think about George Orwell’s book 1984, but I was thinking of examples closer to hand. I had seen a video of a man named Kasim, who was lynched to death by a mob in Hapur, Uttar Pradesh in 2018. In the video, Kasim is sitting in a dry canal near a field. The cow vigilantes beat him up. We can’t know by looking at Qasim, but he has fractured ribs and knees; He has bruises on his body, wounds from a screw-driver and a sickle, and fatal injuries to his private parts.
In the video we can see the audience. Qasim asks for water, but no one answers, and he falls into the mess, as if to sleep on his bed, with one knee bent over the other. For the narrator of my novel, the question that arises is the same as he asked before – what can you write that would make the reader of you drink water to a dying man?
The world comes to us as bad news. In addition to writing fiction about news stories, I’ve used newspapers as the surface of my paintings, using gouache to reshape or replace what I first saw as news. When the pandemic hit America, I painted the obituaries in it new York Times, There were reports of lynching and rape even before India. I asked my sister in Patna to mail me in both Hindi and English newspapers, and then I started working in an attempt to gain some degree of discretion.
I’m not the only one to do this, of course. For the recently unveiled virtual museum, As a Girl Matters, artists and writers respond to a 2018 crime in Kathua, Kashmir. The facts are gruesome and famous. Eight-year-old Asifa Bano was gang-raped and murdered in a temple. She belonged to a nomadic Muslim tribe of shepherds and was grazing horses on public land when she was abducted. Her kidnappers wanted to run away from the area in which Asifa was. The details of the case are terrifying to read as well and it is especially unbearable to imagine a child’s body turning into a battlefield.
Over a hundred visual artists, dancers, writers and musicians have donated works to the virtual museum to pay tribute to Asifa’s life. Here’s a small sample: Arpita Singh draws a geography map on canvas where the names Kathua and Unnao are repeated; Neelima Shaikh presents the tableau of a girl becoming a woman in ‘When Champa Grew Up’; A 1999 black and white photograph of Gauri Gill depicts a shepherd girl and her goat in the desert of Rajasthan. There are many wonderful dance and mixed-media pieces: for example, Mallika Sarabhai’s unflinching, graceful performance of Maya Angelou’s ‘Still I Rise’; A video of Raw by Nature dancers depicting the racist violence of police killings in America; The slow and gentle choreography of the late Astaad Debu alone in a room or Melissa Wu’s scintillating renditions in dancing in the gritty urban spaces of New York. The curated writing on the website shows an equally wide range. From Kiran Desai’s eight haiku, which called for the presence of an eight-year-old girl named Asifa, to an essay by Anuradha Roy on the day the news broke; A poem by Meena Alexander to a poem by Deepti Priya Mehrotra dedicated to Nirbhaya shows that Indian courts heard 64,138 child rape cases in 2016 alone.
Ismail the Shepherd, Barmer’s daughter Sumri, from the series ‘Notes from the Desert’ since 1999. Copyright: Gauri Gill
Contributions to As If a Girl Matters cover a wide range, with established names as well as an eclectic mix of lesser-known ones. For my contribution to the museum, I had sent a painting that I had done in those days, soon after learning about Asifa. I had envisioned the stairs of the temple and I called the painting ‘Hadsa’ which, in my mind, translates as, “a tragic event”. For this painting I used a sheet of newspaper sent by my sister from Patna. Then, a few days later, I did another painting. There was news of girls playing Holi on this page of a Hindi newspaper and luckily there was also a picture of great writer Mahadevi Verma. I titled this painting ‘Girls Hai, Khlene Do’, which I then translated as “It is Spring: Girls Want to Play”. And because the torture Asifa suffered was also the result of her being a Muslim, I included a painting I made on lynchings.
As the months went by and I continued to work on the novel I was writing, I kept thinking about Asifa. One particular twist in that whole warped drama appeared as a special challenge to me. The brutality of the criminals was quite evident, but what I could not understand was that a protest march was organized by a newly formed group to defend the accused. Why? According to the newspaper report I read, the organizer of the march was a high-ranking political leader. If such a heinous crime still found defenders, perhaps it was useless for the narrator of my novel to believe in presenting the truth. Because it was clear that the truth does not necessarily change people’s minds. Facts will be distorted to confirm people’s prejudices and their deepest prejudices. We weren’t just dealing with bad news; Our real problem was bad faith.
How are we so blind to hate? I suspect that some people think that our dislike for one community or the other is inherent in us, that it is so deep and so pure that it is almost natural, if not mythical. But this would be a lie. There is good reason to argue that colonial rule by the British played an important role, at least as far as communal differences in India are concerned. The division is a long, bloody bruise in our collective memory. The death toll is estimated at between 200,000 and two million. In what could be the largest migration in history, one crore to two crore people were displaced.
‘Ladkiyan Hain, Khelne Do’ by Amitava Kumar
But the Partition also came out of nowhere, British historian Alex von Tunzelman told me. He said, “The colonial rule itself was physically violent and helped to build a society in which violence was normalized: this is why Gandhian nonviolence was so radical. This violence was called ‘divide and rule’. coupled with this policy – which was particularly visible after the census began in the 1870s – had dire consequences.” Consider the artwork that the late Zarina Hashmi contributed to the As If a Girl Matters museum: a staggering line, thick and black, arbitrarily drawn across a geography that is otherwise continuous. It is as if a mighty, invisible hand has created a rift, and imposed the ideology of difference across the land. Hashmi’s art is a reminder that the fear of Partition persists even today. The dividing line that cut Asifa’s life, as Hashmi would have said, is now the atlas of our world.
Accepting the explanation given by history, there is another side of me which is not satisfied with merely blaming the British. I cannot echo the questions asked long ago by filmmaker Khwaja Ahmed Abbas: “Was the English whispering in your ear that you could behead any Hindu you found, or would you pluck a knife into the stomach of whatever Muslim you find?” Yes, you find? Did the British even teach us the art of oppressing women of other religions in the market itself? Did they teach us to tattoo Pakistan and Jai Hind on women’s breasts and secret parts?
The study of history can provide context, von Tunzelmann told me, but it does not provide any excuse. I believe this means that we take responsibility. It is astonishing to me that the hate-mongers in our society, conducting their dog-whistle politics, make their mark on the public platform, which is what the colonists successfully did – setting communities around each other’s throats and helping us To deprive the sense of unity. Their obsession is so vulgar that those who protest are thrown in jail, while those who riot are rewarded.
Amitabh Kumar’s ‘Hadsa’
On its website, As If a Girl Matters, the museum expresses its desire to express our common humanity. For me, it starts with the ethic of hospitality, with the idea of making another, who is a stranger, feel welcome in their home. I often think of a poem by the Palestinian-American poet Naomi Shihab Nye, which begins: “What Arabs used to say / When a stranger comes to your door / Feed him for three days / By asking Before who is he, / Where is he from / Where he is going Or, if it is too much, can we at least be more hospitable to our laws and allow them to fully enter our lives?
During the two years or more after Asifa’s murder, I continued to work on my novel. The book ends with a focus on the life left of one man being killed. I was imagining the deaths of Mohamed Akhlaq and George Floyd. We live in a world where the media often parrot the propaganda done by the powerful. In such a world, novels can act as a democratic platform: composed of many characters, and presenting a multiplicity of perspectives, novels can open up to a public realm that is often absent in real life. Or perhaps I am offering a very grand view of my aspirations as a writer. The plain fact is that I wrote a novel to keep alive a little precious truth, a truth about the times we are living in. Ernest Hemingway said, “Write the most truthful sentence you know, and that’s what we should do as a daily work. Remember Asifa and others like her so that the human inside of us also lives on.”
(It appeared in the print edition as “As If a Girl Matters”)
(views are personal)
Amitabh Kumar is the author of the most recent novel A Time Outside This Time. Born and raised in Bihar, he now teaches English at Vassar College, New York.
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