Aligarh-bound
In conversation with Zeyad Masroor Khan, author of ‘City on Fire: A Boyhood in Aligarh’
An astute personal narrative is always able to cast a wider net, going beyond the immediate and intimate to unearth an undeniable truth about society.
Journalist, writer, and filmmaker Zeyad Masroor Khan’s eloquent portrait of his birth city Aligarh in City on Fire: A Boyhood in Aligarh (HarperCollins, 2023) is such an attempt.
Divided into three parts—Childhood, Boyhood, and Manhood, outlining the growth of a person in a city in turmoil, City on Fire demonstrates what is to live like when one is perpetually othered.
However, to describe it this way would be doing it injustice as it goes much beyond describing Aligarh in lore and reality and manages to underline its history of communal violence to depict how one survives. It is a piercing account of a country whose democratic ideas are withering out. City on Fire can easily be a called a portrait of an everyday reality of those who are rendered dispensable in the Hindutva project but at the same time it is a story of a man’s journey of dealing with a personal loss that bears accounting.
In an email conversation, the author discusses what he was trying to do attempting to write this work and more. Edited excerpts:
What distinguishes your memoir from others meditating on being Muslim in India, in my view, is its centralisation on the lived experience in a city and that it relies on readers’ judgement to extrapolate and think of the situation—the biases, the hatred brewing in their own neighbourhoods. While you may not have to necessarily agree to this observation, could you share what you wanted to do with this book?
I do believe that most Muslim writers, and by extension, writers coming from marginalised communities, are driven by a strong desire to tell their stories and steal the narrative from elites representing them as ‘subjects’ with not enough power to tell their stories. All writings by Muslims are important in their own right.
With City of Fire, I wanted readers to live my life, which is as dramatic as anyone who grows up in a Muslim ghetto. The primary aim was to humanise those who reside in Muslim ghettoes and document their aspirations, their coping mechanisms, their flaws and their resilience, without reducing them to monoliths, either good or bad. You tell the story and hope the readers make their [own] conclusions. It was also a personal journey of trying to come to terms with my traumas—some personal, some political.
Aligarh has suffered from stereotypical representation. Like the case with any marginalised community’s representation in popular culture, its complexities aren’t often delved into. One witnesses that in your book. As it was the city where you grew up, so it was natural to turn towards it to make sense of what helped shape your worldview, but I am curious to know if this memoir was also an attempt to course-correct what Aligarh is often reduced to.
Of course. I wouldn’t say Aligarh is free of flaws and its people don’t have their prejudices, but in that way, it isn’t much different from any other north-Indian city. We are more alike than dissimilar. Sadly, the media and cinema tend to demonise Muslim neighbourhoods and try to cover up the flaws of Hindu-dominant societies. More than any political messaging, it is these representations that establish Muslims as a sort of ‘troublemaker’ community in the eyes of the masses.
I intended to show that Aligarh is more complicated than the one-dimensional views popularised by the national media. Even editors and journalists who have spent considerable time in the field aren’t free from these prejudices about the city. So yes, you can call it an attempt to course-correct that.
You describe Farsh Manzil—your ancestral home in Upar Kot, Aligarh—in meticulous detail. The house makes for a fascinating candidate for literature. While several incidents help establish the role it plays in your growing up years, I was wondering if you could help share any that cemented the belief that the place you occupy had a larger story to tell (the part of the family that moved to Pakistan, Sayyed Baba, etc.). A lot of it must have had to do with the fact that Badi Ammi was such a captivating storyteller, isn’t it?
I wrote City On Fire in the aftermath of the Delhi riots in February 2020. In the coverage of the riots, what struck me was the parallels with the riots of Aligarh I saw growing up. The people of Northeast Delhi were facing the same oppression Upar Kot had faced in the 1990s. It was a sort of déjà vu, a feeling that this had happened before. And if I could use the story of my home and locality as a warning to the rest of India about what polarisation can do to poison our souls, why not? It’s nearly impossible to take away someone’s suffering, but it’s possible to try your best so that it doesn’t happen to anyone else, again.
Badi Ammi was the biggest influence as she was a great storyteller. But I do keep saying that Aligarh is a city of storytellers, it’s just that most just don’t sit down to write these fascinating stories. As a town, we like extrapolation, hyperbole and humour—always a worthy arsenal in the hands of a writer. I only borrowed from what I observed.
Despite being a boisterous boy, who, if not keen to stand out, definitely did enjoy the feeling of being recognised, so I was wondering what convinced you to write an essay on Osama Bin Laden in school? Your description of what transpired later also signals how the teacher didn’t hold it against you and made you promise something. As most of the otherization one begins feeling when in school—by peers and teachers alike, could you help share how they can become spaces where children allow themselves to explore and not be constrained to think a certain way? How can one choose to identify and not be vilified for the same when it comes to that?
The essay on Laden came out of angst, ignorance, and a sense of rebellion against prevailing viewpoints. I was lucky to have the empathy and support of my teacher. They didn’t castigate me as a problem to be dealt with.
At the same time, the schooling system, especially in India, is based on conformism, not on learning. Instead of inculcating confidence in students to deal with the realities of the world, it stops them from unfurling their wings. In most Indian schools, any deviation from the image of an obedient kid subservient to their parents and teachers is anarchist or abnormal. We have to chase some non-existent norm. Some schools in metropolitans are changing, but they are only accessible to the elite. I honestly don’t think the current education system in India can be salvaged—it needs a complete overhaul. We have to create a system which is sensitive, diverse, scientific, and geared towards making classrooms spaces where children feel liberated, not caged.
It’s difficult to fight the vilification you talk about. Children should start by not believing everything their parents and teachers tell them—in reality, they are as clueless as you. We are overtly reverent to parents/teachers, elevating men and women to the status of demigods, while in colleges/offices in the West, people refer to their superiors by their first names, eliminating a bit of the hierarchy. We should also stop referring to teachers as Sir, Mam, Guru, Ustad, etc. Basic things like this need to change to convert classrooms into open spaces, where the conversation flows both ways—our elders need to unlearn a lot too.
The book is not without humour, though. With such a deeply personal work, how crucial was it for you to render lightness to the text?
I am one of those unsophisticated people wary of reading something too grim. If City on Fire was one incident of communal violence after another, very few would have read it outside of serious readers and academics. I didn’t want it to read like a long journalistic piece, or a long preachy chunk of text. I wholeheartedly believe humour and nuance work better than self-indulgent righteousness. By the time the reader picks the book, they already know there will be a lot of traumas inside. My role was to tell it like a tale from Aligarh should be told, including the satirical and politically incorrect elements that are a part of its culture. Anybody who comes from there knows Aligarh as a place where the people have an incredible sense of humour. It would have been a disservice to that city if I hadn’t included that element of irony.
“It is in these lanes Upar Kot lives and dies,” you write. It is such a powerful, grief-stricken sentence. But when one thinks of home, one also thinks of parents, too. I was wondering if you could share what it felt like to write about your father, the grief of not only losing him but also the fact that you were not informed—with the benefit of hindsight, one can see why, but this is trickier, and only you know best—that he was suffering from cancer.
It felt like a burden was lifted from my soul. For more than a decade, the loss of my father was living inside me, unhealed. I knew beforehand that it’d be the toughest part of the book to be written. I procrastinated around it until I couldn’t, and it eventually burst open. I do think it was my right to be told that my father was going to die. But every ‘should’ only exists in hindsight and we live and die in the shadows of a thousand ‘what-ifs’.
Writing about my father was like reconnecting to the good memories of him that I had buried somewhere in the grave of my consciousness. I only remember him from his last days when he was suffering from cancer. I now see that as a disservice to his memory. If you catch a terminal disease, would you want to be only remembered by that phase? I don’t think so. Writing about him, in all his hues, was therapeutic. I now have a healthier relationship with his memories.
As City on Fire also bears imprints of intergenerational trauma, it must have continued triggering you while working on this book. And it doesn’t help how insensitive and insufferable the country has become towards Muslims. Could you help share what made you sail through recounting affectionate but difficult memories?
I was constantly triggered, especially when Covid was unfairly pinned on Tablighi Jamaat and Indian Muslims. But amidst this chaos, my memories became a solace, a mental escape to the simpler times of the 1990s—when my family was whole, and the world seemed simple. I kept reading a lot. Books by Vivian Gornick, Michel Foucault, and James Baldwin became a sort of refuge.
Taking long walks in my neighbourhood, I’d observe lock workers tirelessly toiling away, even amidst a pandemic threatening to take away their livelihoods. Their resilience made me realise my privileges. It’s ironic how the entitled and privileged crib the most while safely tucked in their homes, benefiting from the labour of these people. They believe in the capitalist lies: that everything belongs to them. I don’t agree with this celebration of greed. This is what is killing our planet. These workers, though, don’t have the luxury of despair. They share whatever little they have with others and carry on despite the power dynamics skewed against them. Yet they’re the ones who suffered in riots, and if laws like CAA-NRC came about, end in detention centres.
I kept asking myself, “Why hasn’t anyone written about the people in Upar Kot? Why do Indian writers only keep writing about the boring stories of the rich and powerful?” And I just kept writing. I believed it was unlikely somebody, for a long time, would attempt to tell the story of the people of my neighbourhood, and that was what eventually kept me going.
Which brings me to this: the support you received from the South Asia Speaks fellowship. How do such programs help writers who may otherwise find it hard to navigate finding a mentor who could help shape their thoughts and make a book happen?
I got South Asia Speaks mentorship at a difficult phase in my life. My mentor Isaac Chotiner not only honed my writing but also gave me confidence in my abilities in the utterly depressing times of the pandemic. The team at South Asia Speaks led by Sonia Faleiro is doing exemplary work in finding new writers and giving them a platform to build a writing career. Such programs are important as most writers are full of self-doubt and have difficulty believing in their abilities. The right mentor can remove these blocks in your mind and hone the writer inside you. And if you have it in you and are willing to sacrifice your life to the pain of writing, you will pick over from there. But everyone needs a little push, don’t they?
Unless stated otherwise, all images belong to Saurabh Sharma.
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