Blood Brothers describes itself as a family saga and looks at how Hindu and Muslim identities in India segue into each other because they are essentially part of the same stock. It tells a tale of how love can topple over into hate by pure error, willful greed and careful plotting. This author-editors autobiographical narrative is a piquant tale of subaltern history that straddles three generations, spanning Indias passage from colonialism to independence and the appearance of communalism, besides offering an intimate account of Calcuttas history from imperial capital to trade union stronghold.

Telinipara, the “mud and thatch huts colony of mill workers” next to the Victoria Jute Mill, both of which still live on in todays Kolkata, is where Akbars grandfather first arrives from Bihar as a young boy in search of a job. By the time the book ends, the colony has been mildly gentrified, Akbars father has returned after having taken temporary refuge in Lahore, and Akbar is 17, a student of the citys most elite college and burdened forever with the guilt of a dare that ends in tragedy.

Rahmatullahs family, friends and foes emerge slowly from the mist of other fables. If there is one irritant, it is the manner in which their arrival is punctuated repeatedly by myriad tales that mark endless detours to the history of everything: Akbars prodigious knowledge and curiosity are, in the first quarter of the book, an occasional burden for the reader.

Every time we begin to know intimately the family of Prayaag turned Rahmatullah, his family, his friends, his gradual ascent to genteel mobility, Akbar whisks us away to lessons on the Mughals, the Koran, the British Raj, the Sufis, descriptions of jalebi and electricity, introductions to various gods from various religions, and even English translations of common Indian words. Exasperatingly distracting. Akbar knows, and he is unrelenting in his desire to share.

However, the exquisite charm of his prose pulls us into these descriptions, (“the English are bringing bottled fire to the mill…a magic fire that gives light but neither dances nor burns… it lives on the edge of an iron thread through which it travels for miles and miles without being seen.”) but only at the cost of the flow of the ancestral saga.

Fortunately, the miserly, intense and wise Rahmatullah, orphaned by famine in Bihar, who will one day become the Sheikh of Telinipara, doggedly shoulders his way to take centre-stage in the tale even as the country skids towards independence.

With Blood Brothers, Telinipara, the mohalla of MJ Akbars fictionalised autobiography, is likely to attain some of the mystique that is evoked by names such as Lahore or Lucknow, Hogwarts School and Abbey Road and Casablanca or Chandni Chowk.

As the narrative moves within reach of the authors living memory, the characters lose their sparseness and acquire more resonance. The revelations become more personal, more intimate. Rahmatullah is delighted his son, Akbar Ali, has inherited his dark colour, although the people of Telinipara are disappointed, for “Dark was a poor mans colour”. Akbar Ali will grow up one day and want to marry a fair-skinned woman. His marriage is arranged to the pale Kashmiri, Imitiaz, who cries out in fright on seeing a black man on the nuptial night.

Akbars evocation of the Calcutta of the 50s and 60s, the arrival of new Indian heroes such as JRD Tata, the nostalgic trips to Nizams kathi rolls, and the politics of Gandhi, Jinnah and Nehru as they touched the residents of Telinipara are vivid memoir. In some ways this is as much about bringing together the discourse of a mellifluous Islam and a discredited Islam as it is about one family. It is a discourse that reminds the mainstream consciousness that the gentle moorings of any religion are often overrun by fleeting perception and priestly fervour.

The absolute despair of post-partition riots is brought out when the authors father returns to India from Lahore saying, “There are too many Muslims in Pakistan,” only to find himself in preventive detention a few years later. “And arent there too many Hindus in India,” questions a teenage MJ angrily. “Be that as it may, this is my land,” his father answers.

Blood Brothers is a rich, sometimes rambling, saga. Those who like their history leavened with levity need look no further.

When M J Akbar questions his father as to why he returned in 1947 to Telinipara from Dhaka, which he had fled in fear of mob violence, his answer is unequivocal: there were too many Muslims there. This reason is enough to poke a hole in the entire premise of a shared religion, to the exclusion of other commonalities, being a sound basis of modern statehood. 

The family’s story, however, begins long before that event in famine-hit Bihar, from where an intrepid Prayaag, the author’s grandfather, moves as a child to Telinipara in Bengal’s jute belt in search of food and family. He is taken in by a Muslim tea shop owner, and converts to Islam out of the highest of all motivations, love. An upwardly mobile man, his circle of Hindu and Muslim friends deal with potentially combustible situations as best they can. 

The tone of the book is of a bedtime tale told through long nights, of family legends and stories which have been retold so often that they become part of one’s thought process. I don’t know whether M J Akbar’s research took him long or the book came to him as a recollection of stories he had been told, but he weaves historical details into the story quite seamlessly.  

Details like the dialogues of the Marx Brothers movie that his father sees in Calcutta, the life of the white sahibs at Victoria jute mill, the fulcrum of economic life in Telinipara, and most of all the strange bazaar buzz of a riot about to happen, are all just right. An important event in Blood Brothers is the launching and failure of the Khilafat movement. It is perhaps for the first time that the movement has been held accountable in such a manner for the forces that it unleashed. 

The most moving parts of the novel for me occur right at the end, when a young M J Akbar, shaken by the death of his friend Kamala in a communal riot by a bullet meant for him, returns to Presidency College from Telinipara. He now has a heightened sense of awareness that life for him has changed irrevocably. At seventeen, life has already assumed a responsibility that will not be shrugged off. They become “blood brothers” of the title. The scope of the book in its historical sweep is large, from the 1870s to the late 1960s. It is a good read, more so for the fact that for a large number of young people in India, for reasons only CBSE can explain, the country’s post-independence history is a cipher, only to be understood through boring political science lectures on the Constitution. 

This book fills at least some part of that void, even if it’s best read merely as one narrative among the many others that could be told. In all, this book should especially be read by anyone who thinks that the Indian Muslim should be subjected to a local version of the “Tebbit” cricket loyalty test (“which side do you cheer?”) time and again.

It is a personal account, which tells a larger story: explaining the meaning of life to a man who was growing up in a time when you were either known by the religion you belonged to or by the wealth you had. What is more interesting is the anecdotal pace that Akbar brings to the book: from describing his grandfather’s death, which reads, “My grandfather died while I was play ing on his chest. That was my first stroke of luck” to paragraphs which capture the hypocrisy of the babu brigade that was prevalent in Bengal. Akbar includes the famous letter that Baboo Satyajit Banerjee wrote, in which he invites his English friends to a night of whoring, couched as an invitation to see nautch (which means dance). 

It is also a book that has an underlying resilience: that of a man whose family, much like Indian families today, paid a premium on their child’s education. Riveting are the anecdotes that tell us about Akbar’s education: first at the tony Calcutta Boys School and then again at Presidency College where amidst breasts and Marx, Akbar gets his first real lessons in life. It is this ability to weave incidents that are paradoxical, that make Blood Brothers such a compelling read. Even the dedication in the book tells a story. Akbar dedicates this book to his children, Mukulika and Prayaag. Prayaag was also the name of Akbar’s grandfather. It is almost as if life for Akbar, from grandfather to son, has come a full circle.

There are also early signals in the form of anecdotes that Akbar regales us with which have a lot to with his current profession as a journalist. His struggle with the ‘Letter to the Editor’ of The Statesman makes for some delightful reading and give us a window into the world of journalism that is now perhaps nonexistent. 

It is a saga that is steeped in emotion but an emotion which is unique to Akbar: there is a thoroughness of research that imparts broad-spectrum wisdom: from the man who invented nicotine, to the founder of condoms, all find a place in this book. From the art of circumcision to the art of being circumspect in English company, this is a tale told with fondness and finesse. That makes Blood Brothers such a fine book and a compelling read. One, which has something for everyone, I would imagine. I would even hesitate to add that this is perhaps Akbar’s finest book yet. 

The Hindu
New Delhi, 15 April 2006

The truth behind history
M.J. Akbar's latest book is a history of India couched as a fascinating family chronicle, finds ANJANA RAJAN 

It would be a tragedy if one were to be imprisoned by despair

It is still common to find well-meaning parents in India admonishing their children to stay away from novels, fearing such light reading might interfere with their `real' education. But even such hardliners would have to admit the genre acquires unarguable dignity in the hands of noted author M.J. Akbar, who, despite a long career as a journalist and historian, has turned to fiction with his latest book. "Blood Brothers: A Family Saga" - brought out by Roli Books - is actually a blend of fact and fiction, history and family memoirs.

  It begins with the fascinating tale of Akbar's grandfather, Rahmatullah — "He who has been blessed with the mercy of God" — and continues into the author's generation. But this is more than a family chronicle. "I don't think any book is justified if it's just a story," says the author. "It has to be a macro story, not a micro story."

Thus it was necessary for him to place it in a precisely delineated historical context, from the late 19th Century to the era after independence. Then again, in writing the history of his family, he took the help of fiction. "Anyone who writes knows that truth is untidy," he says. Fiction, on the other hand, helps convey the truth with clarity.

Craft of language

"When we write we don't just write for ourselves," he continues. "It's not a diary. If the craft of the language is not there, it doesn't achieve its purpose," says Akbar who edits The Asian Age.

So fiction, in providing a clearer narration of events, "becomes a more important form of truth," he comments, adding, "In fact I believe fiction is more truthful than a diary." Considering the selective hypnosis memory is prey too, it is an unassailable argument.

As for craft, the author's prose certainly runs with a rare lucidity, his varied characters and their setting — village Telinipara in Bengal, dependent for its livelihood on the Victoria Jute Mill — made vibrant with delightful bits of description, conversation and a subtle wit.

It was reaching a particular phase in life that made him write this book, he says. "And as usual, death determines phases in life." So it was the death of his parents that spurred him to pen a story he felt needed to be told.

‘Willing to be used'

Running through the book is a constant undercurrent of tension between Hindus and Muslims. The British rulers were famed for their divide-and-rule policy, but India was fertile ground. "The British Government wouldn't have used us if we were not willing to be used," remarks the author.

Though the story spans a century and a half, some of the conversations could as well be taking place today, in pockets of India where electricity is yet to reach, where the women are unlettered and the men semi-literate, where diseases are feared as manifestations of an angered Goddess. But the rulers and the ruled are now fellow Indians. Is there no solution then?

"Of course there is a solution. It would be a tragedy if one were to be imprisoned by despair." India is making progress, he asserts, but we miss it when "we measure history by our lifetimes."

Surely, if we feel these are difficult times, our parents and their parents lived though even more difficult times. And if the media is often accused of not reaching beyond the urban, educated elite, it is because such is "the nature of the beast," since the media cannot survive without corporate sponsorship, and the poor are not consumers.

"All we can do is extend the reach. That's what progress is all about," he says, and this progress is being undeniably made. "The idea of India began with four million dead in famine."

Writing a book, he muses, leaves an impact upon the writer. "And this book has taught me not to be judgemental. We deceive ourselves when we become judgemental."

The Pioneer