Author Anjum Hasan's latest book "History's Angel" is a darkly funny portrait of one of Australia’s most important neighbours. Her work sheds light on the complexities of life, love, writing history, and how national and patriotic myths can be maliciously subverted.
Date- Thursday, February 29 2024
Location- Phone Call
Firstly, congratulations on your new book. Upon reading a bit about it, I got to know that it seems to grapple with the questions of identity and self-discovery. Could you elaborate on how these themes are woven into the narratives?
Yeah, so this novel is my fourth one. I've written three previous novels and a couple of collections of short stories, and in some ways, the preoccupations in this novel are similar to the ones that I grapple with in all my fiction, namely fairly humdrum characters at the center who carry the narrative along. I tend to have protagonists who take up a lot of space. And this novel is no different. There is a school teacher of history called Alif Muhammad and the novel is about his adventures (and his misadventures) in today's Delhi. Like my previous novels, it's set in a very specific time and place. Delhi from 2018-2019, everything that was going on in those years, as well as Alif’s run-ins with his Principal at the school, his relationship with his family, the kind of conversations he has with his friends. All this is geared towards creating a portrait of a particular kind of liberal Indian who doesn't actually want to be seen through the lens of identity and politics, but because he happens to be Muslim and because he happens to be living in a city where that identity has become increasingly critical, he's caught in that role.
So the point of the novel is, what does a man who doesn't necessarily want to take sides in politics do if more and more people around him are foisting that identity on him?
And crafting characters like Alif, do you think that you borrowed him from people that you know in real life or would you say that he's completely fictitious?
Well, that's a question all writers of fiction try and hedge somehow because I think most of us are doing a bit of both.
Unless we come clean and say this is based on this historical figure or this is based on this person that I used to know, for the most part, fiction writers are doing an interesting hotchpotch because you take clues from life, you take little bits from people that you know and you craft it into somebody who's completely fictional. At least that's what I do for the most part. And that's also true of Alif. There's nobody I know like him individually. There may be aspects of him that are similar to me, aspects that are similar to people that I see who feel sort of out of sync with the times. But he also sort of channels some of the history of my reading. So when I think of someone like Alif, I think of Hamlet or Aziz in E.M. Foster’s ‘A Passage to India’.
It’s not that my hero is necessarily identifiable as having been influenced by any of these older characters, but for me, the reading leaves a mark and I feel that the ‘thinking personality’ type resides in him (or the overthinking type). So to answer your question, he's more a fiction than fact.
You talked a bit about the history and the book also deals with subverting traditional narratives of history. So what message do you hope that readers take away regarding the importance of critically examining historical accounts that have been made by either people in the majority or people who claim to be the traditional custodians of history?
Well, it's interesting for Alif because he's not a well-established historian in an academic sense. He's not a professional researcher, he's just teaching history to young children. So he's not actually looking to set the record straight or wrest the narrative back. He's just hoping to be left alone to teach his history imaginatively. And for him, the imaginative bit comes from just showing them that there are all sorts of interesting diversions and footnotes in history, which you won't get from the prescribed history books and for which you have to use your imagination, maybe go out, see things, use your own experience of living in present-day Delhi as a take-off point to imagine how other people lived in other times. So he's just a creative teacher.
But the school where he teaches has a new principal and while the older principal allowed him a lot of liberty to do his own thing, the new one is very suspicious of why he is teaching chapters of history which don’t strictly seem to serve any utilitarian purpose.
On the one hand in India, there's so much popular history writing happening, so there's an appetite for more detailed history and more creatively retold history. But on the other hand, in the mainstream, if one can call it that, there's an impatience with too much historical detail, and too many angles. The syllabus in schools has become so streamlined, it's hard to imagine how a child will understand anything of the richness of India's past if they're just given the very bare facts. In this environment, Alif is trying to hold on to his idea of history teaching. And again, this is something I try doing in all my novels, which is to see how ordinary people react in an era or in a period where there are lots of very overwhelming changes happening quickly. These are people who are not ever going to be at the forefront of the change, but they are affected by it so how do they deal with it?
It seems like the novel explores the intersection of identity, education and national narratives, especially against the backdrop of suspicion and indifference. Was incorporating humour in this a conscious choice?
That's the way I write. I can't write unless I'm amusing myself and you have to amuse yourself because you're stuck with this thing for 3-4 years. You're going back to it every day and it has to seem enjoyable. The only way I can do it is by bringing some kind of slant to it, which is of course, through the eyes of the protagonist. How does he look at this world? And he often is very ironic about it.
So I think it boils down to what is at stake for the character. If a character is very invested, he's less likely to be funny and less likely to be at a distance from the whole thing to be able to see the humanity in it. But in the case of Alif, he's not that invested, at least to begin with. Early in the novel, I say that the status quo makes him happy. He doesn't want things to change. So when the character is this retiring low key unambitious figure, it's easier to bring in humour. Of course, very quickly things do start happening that make it harder for Alif to remain neutral, his heart and his head both get pulled into what’s happening.
Our publications' audience is mainly university students, particularly GenZs. In what ways do you think that your exploration of these themes would resonate with them? Could you pitch your novel to them in one sentence?
Yeah, that's an interesting question. Well, there are young people in the novel, even younger than GenZ. Alif and his wife, Tahira, have a 14-year-old. What generation would that be?
She would either be in late Gen Z or early Gen Alpha.
I am very interested in this friction between generations, simply because values are changing so fast. It feels like several lifetimes in the space of one. The ways in which children or teenagers or young adults speak to their parents, do they have a common language left? So to your audience, I would say that the one thing that might amuse them is how younger characters relate to their parents' generation in today's India because there are several bits of the novel where Alif is trying to have these conversations with his kid. Secondly, these are university students and I'm imagining many of them in the humanities, some of them studying history, right? It might interest them to read a portrait of the city. What does it feel like to live in contemporary India, specifically Delhi today- one of the world’s oldest cities? Of course, a novel can only give one point of view. It's never going to capture everything, but it does animate what life is like for that one person or that one family, so hopefully that will appeal to your classmates.
Now, that's a great pitch! Certainly. I'm sure a lot of students would be very interested to read about that. My last question to you is, if not “History’s Angel”, what would you name your novel?
Oh, that's a tough one because now the name feels as though it is absolutely welded to the novel. If I had to pick an alternative, maybe it would be something to do with the Urdu poetry that Alif knows a little bit of. There's a line early in the novel, where one character quotes this famous Ghalib couplet which loosely translates to ‘when things are so bad that they almost become good’. I like that paradox. So if I had to think of another title, I would have tried to find an English phrase that could capture that.
That's lovely. Well, I think we can all agree that “History’s Angel” is a really good title. It's very intriguing. It's definitely something that you see and you immediately want to pick up.
Thank you so much for taking the time now to talk with us today.
Yeah, thanks a lot.
