On 'History's Angel' by Anjum Hasan
Notes and observations on one of 2023's more significant Indian novels
Finding people who are at peace with circumstance is tough enough in real life, but tougher, surely, in novels. In Anjum Hasan’s History’s Angel, the protagonist, Alif, is more or less at peace. Peace here means a state of pleasant intellectual jostling, in which Alif, a history teacher at a school in Delhi, subjects every other living moment against a possibility or actuality in History. Alif loves his job, too, and the idea that he may be over-qualified for it doesn’t bother him. He’s angelic, come to think of it, in the sense that he can float away from his social-real station and the fresh hostilities brewing all around it. In a recent article on Patricia Highsmith’s work, the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek claims that Thomas Ripley, that famous Highsmith creation, is ‘angelic, living in a universe which precedes the Law and its transgression (sin).’ Now, Thomas and Alif are as different as different can be, but if you replace ‘the Law’ with ‘the Present’ in Zizek’s formulation, we arrive at a definition of angelic that applies to Alif.
The other characters in the novel are characters as we usually find them—they need; they want; and they are liable to be thinking of the future and how the present’s hegemonies may shape it. Alif’s wife, Tahira, is working on an MBA to get a better job and, hopefully, to be able to buy a flat—ideally in a secular part of the city with no shadows of ghetto life. Their teenage son, Salim, has a general disregard for studies and romances the idea of becoming a tech entrepreneur. Alif’s parents, Mahtab and Shagufta, are in a bit of a bind with a strident beneficiary, Ahmad, who has turned a bit too religious and, perhaps, dangerous. Alif’s friend, Ganesh, with whom he gets drunk now and then, is in a long-term marital crisis, a situation enlivened by contact with his old flame (and victim), Prerna.
The novel slowly adds dashes of trouble to Alif’s life. At first, it is the chafing of the feet from a new pair of shoes bought from cousin Farouq’s shop. Then it is trouble at the school, where a new regime has taken over and where a devious kid puts Alif in the line of prejudiced enquiry. Then there is a sputter of mid-life crisis, with Alif’s attraction towards Prerna and the attendant tangles with a desired other’s unknowability (I loved the fact that Prerna had some connection with Muzaffarnagar, which is where I’m from).
To this mix, the national context, and in it the specific happenings in the capital city, provides background. The news is full of rancour for Muslims. Discrimination is rife. There are protests in Shaheen Bagh in the latter half of the novel. The air carries a threat of violence.
There is, in effect, no shortage of incidents in the novel. Never once does the nothing-happens label apply. We turn the pages here for the same reason we do so in most novels: to know what happens next. But there is an aversion to the oppression of Event. By event with a capital E, I mean that nub of signification or significance that most novels today, or at least novels that aim to be called political, feel obliged to provide (there is, of course, a whole bunch of present-day novels that aim for nothing more than showing 21st-century disaffection through the romantic escapades or stuntedness of their main characters, and find their politics in that)—where, say, a matter of life or death finds direction, or where crumbling circumstance and awful agency play out the direst consequences for the protagonist, or where antagonisms between characters find the fullest voice, or, more generally, where a bunch of pages are designed to land as the loudest thuds. Note the superlatives here, for irrespective of the plot in question, an Event-based model of the novel aims to evoke in the reader a superlative reaction at certain junctures: a feeling of breathlessness, of being swept away by the intensity of the happenings, and inevitably emerging from them with the aid of the vocabulary that cover-speak readily provides: ‘cutting’, ‘scathing’, ‘searing’, ‘mindnumbing’ et al. The model is linked with the processes that produce and market stories, and can work like an injunction on writers—hence the word oppression. Hasan has, in all her work, averted this injunction. History’s Angel wasn’t going to be an exception.
But this aversion can require engineering too. In an essay on the work of Raymond Chandler, the philosopher Fredric Jameson arrives at ‘the interview’ as the rudimentary form of a Chandler episode, “whose ur-form… involves no more than two actors at any given time.” The interview form suited Chandler no less because of his penchant for description. Every time Philip Marlowe meets a new client or a person of interest, we get generous descriptions of interiors and the person’s appearance and tics (and choice of drink). I claim that the mode of one-on-one conversations suits any writer who knows they like describing spaces and people. This mode is visible in a majority of episodes, or incidents, in History’s Angel. The novel progresses through serial one-on-one conversations, all designed to either give Alif’s history-dives ample bandwidth or to allow us a personal history of the other character. There is an artificial cleanliness to this schema, a constant whiff of set-up. Sometimes, a complication is explicitly avoided. A planned meeting between Ganesh, Prerna, and Alif becomes a meeting of two: Ganesh is unbelievably held up in traffic. The conversation at a dinner hosted by Alif’s family for Ganesh’s family begins to arrive at politics but is hastily cut to an episode between Alif and Salim. At his parents' house, Alif either converses with Mahtab or with Shagufta—rarely are all three in conversation together. When Alif has to talk to Ahmad, the two go out for a walk. Who is avoiding the mess, we wonder, the characters or the novelist?
Thankfully, this is not always the case, and the narrative does, at times, stay in a place where there are multiple characters intent on speaking or doing. Things get delightfully messy when that happens. There is a knife attack inside a living room. There is a fine illustration, inside a school staffroom, of how horrid News interrupts hallowed History. There is a conversation full of yucky Islamophobia, ending in Tahira’s tears. There is a hilarious enquiry-committee scene that I found to be equal to the grim, characteristically tight one in J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace. These episodes elevate the novel, and Hasan’s achievement is to make them do so without any of them acquiring the centrality of Event.
I go back to what I called ‘the constant whiff of set-up’ a couple of paragraphs before and acknowledge the contradiction. The multi-character episodes are also set up. And perhaps what I see as visible artificiality is just necessary artifice, and not as visible in general as it is to me. Fiction writers read fiction more harshly. As one myself, I suffer from the habit of, metaphorically speaking, seeing a building and trying to note the beams and pillars, of trying to see the rebars and concrete, even.
Hasan’s love of the language, and her ear for its music, shows all through. There is a felicity with the full range English has to offer, the knowing confidence of an experienced novelist easily subverting the common adages applicable to lesser writers. Adverbs, for example. The American school will advise writers to minimise them. The advice doesn’t apply to Hasan. We have five adverbs and modifiers on the very first page:
Alliteration, assonance and a general deftness with adjectives, all nearing Nabokovian levels, and occasionally seeming inspired by Nabokov’s prose, abound. We have ‘damp eroticism’, ‘paradisiacal pampering’, ‘tremulous awe’, ‘labyrinthine laptop’, ‘shelled pomegranate’, ‘bulbous sofa’, ‘two-toned, pointed Oxfords decorated with shapely arcs of perforated detail’, ‘bald fact’, ‘intricately coiffured housewives’, and others in the first twenty or so pages. These are constructions one wouldn’t be surprised to find in ‘Lolita’. A short paragraph is given to arrive at the word ‘beetle-browed’ for Salim’s eyebrows. Humbert Humbert was beetle-browed, as we were told early on in Nabokov’s novel.
There is a generous sprinkling of beautiful sentences. Sample these two, the first one of which is, I think, the kind of sentence—its music earned with no compromise on specificity—not many Indian writers in English can write:
In the night streets of Mehrauli, hands will now be shaping an elastic yeasty dough and slapping one flatbread after the other onto the insides of tandoors improvised from oil drums and aglow with live coals, and then fishing out each puffed-up piece with a hooked rod and flinging it into baskets piled high. Other hands will be laying on embers the skewered, marinated meat, and fanning the flames so that spark light the faces of the men who crowd around tearing the hot flesh and eating soundlessly, quickly, unemotionally.
It reminded me of Irwin Allan Sealy describing the making of jalebis in Trotter-nama:
He held his muslin pouch above the hot kadhai and spun a twisting thread of white batter into the oil. A chain of loops and curls and rings formed there, floating on the oil and sizzling gently as it went from white to gold […] The halvai took up a slotted ladle and scooped the golden chain out of the oil. He placed it on a mesh and let the oil drain into a second kadhai. Then he seized the ring and plunged them into a bowl of syrup. When the jalebis had plumped up, but before they had lost their crispness, the halvai broke, the halwai broke off the three rings and pressed on them a tissue of beaten silver […]
Reading sentences so fine (and dexterous) is its own joy; it makes us forget concerns of Story and Plot. In Hasan’s novel, the English is like Sealy’s jalebis: plumped up, but still crisp. Occasional oversight is inevitable, though I do not remember encountering it in History’s Angel, except perhaps on the two pages where the words ‘calcified’ and ‘beguilements’ entered speech.
I have focused much on words and sentences because unlike the newspaper review, which usually limits itself to under a thousand words, there is no limit on space here. Reviews of History’s Angel have focused on elements of the story, or its cast of characters, or it being a Delhi novel. The Hindustan Times review by Saudamini Jain called it a busy novel (it is full of incidents) but also saw History as ‘the heavyweight’, the element that ‘hangs over everything’ and ‘comes in the way of narrative.’ Jain considers that ‘this may well have been the intention’ but ultimately regards Alif’s history-reveries as ‘a crutch.’ I regard this last assessment as unduly harsh. I enjoyed the reveries. Hasan uses them for several purposes: as Alif’s way of zoning out from a conversation, as his way of contributing to a conversation with something that isn’t exactly comforting to others and marks him as unique, as a signifier of what he chooses to be silent about, as a tool of world-building (the Delhiness of the novel is constituted of these reveries), or as a running thread of disabusement (don’t know if this is a word) that wraps around itself that which may be regarded as the novel’s nuanced ‘message’. If there was anything that left me dissatisfied on occasion, it was the narrative and its incident-creation. I did not, eg., fully buy into Mahtab’s trauma from a shootout long ago (he was a cop in U.P.) and failed to see what purpose that bit served. I thought the novel needed one more incident around Salim, Alif’s son, for the simple reason that the one thing that can jolt a man out of a rich inner life is the constant worrying about his progeny’s future.
But these are complaints one can come up with for any novel. My overall experience was, indubitably, one of reading a truly accomplished work. I noted, or perhaps I constructed, the thread of continuity with Hasan’s earlier novel, The Cosmopolitans. Qayenaat, its fifty-something protagonist, ‘the motherless girl who lived in a government bungalow and wanted so much to be an artist,’ has to rebuild herself after recent mishaps while avoiding crushing nostalgia for her days of potential. As a novel written during the UPA years, The Cosmopolitans is premised on a kind of easy cosmopolitanism that was available to the educated middle classes (a small percentage of the population) in the first six or so decades after independence. This cosmopolitanism engendered in some an artistic impulse, and in the novel it is, at first, the failures of fulfilling this impulse (and the coveting, with a hint of jealousy, of those for whom it was fulfilled) that drives the drama. But the ultimate negation of this cosmopolitanism happens in the hinterland, where it is clear how an overwhelming majority is denied it and a tiny minority lays claim to it in brutal or delusional ways. In a deft inversion, Qayenaat the Quixote returns to the friendship of Saathi the Sancho (her one-time ex) at the end of her adventures, somewhat at peace with unlived possibilities and somewhat aware of how what is already hers may be enough. History’s Angel’s Alif is, like Qayenaat, the child of a government servant; and also, in the meaningful ways of understanding the word, a thorough cosmopolitan. But History’s Angel is a novel written during the Modi years. For the middle-class Muslim protagonist, the impulse towards Art is—has to be, arguably—replaced by an impulse towards History. Ambition of all kinds is chucked out of the protagonist’s inner world. The playground is limited to a historical city (the hinterland gives even more grisly stories of violence). For Alif, there is no return from adventure possible, because adventure itself is impossible; the only adventures are the adventures inside the mind. The option of emigration, therefore, must be firmly on the table. No country for those aware of History, ours.