Jaya Bhattacharji Rose
Q. Why don’t you tell us what City on Fire is about. What sparked off this book?
A. City on Fire is a memoir. To understand my story, you’ll have to understand where I come from. I come from Aligarh, my home is in the middle of a Hindu ghetto and a Muslim ghetto. I saw a lot of riots and communal violence. So many people had perished in those communal riots, but nothing about them has ever been written.There was no literature about this violence that happened in my locality. This book is my personal history. The spark was possibly the Delhi riots in 2020, they resurfaced my memories. At that point, I had taken a break from my job and I was trying to understand the parallel between the riots in Aligarh and Delhi.
Q. How was it to write it in the first person and delve into these memories? What did it do to you?
A. I would say that delving into those memories was very traumatic. In Indian society, we are told that if something bad has happened, you should leave those things behind and move on. But I don’t believe in the concept of moving on. I don’t think it’s even possible. So when I thought of writing my own story, first of all, I had to be fair to everyone around me. I could not be unjust to my brother, to my father, to people of my neighbourhood and even the people who attacked my home because I had to see them as human beings first. And then will come the biases, the divide between us. It was a pretty painful experience because I had to write about the death of my father, which I witnessed during my college years. I had to write about the riots which somehow I had forgotten about. But, at the same time, it was also a therapeutic experience because until and unless you come to terms with your past, you cannot move ahead.
Listen to Part 1 of the interview here:
Zeyad speaks of growing up in Aligarh
Q. What do you hope to achieve by having written this book? Was it solely a personal exercise or do you have a greater intent?
A. I wouldn’t say that I wanted to change something. I won’t claim that kind of intent. I would just say that because I just wanted to tell my story. There is so much conversation on social media, in media, about the life of a Muslim in India. And there are all kinds of opinions. There is a predominant opinion that Muslims are somehow appeased. But the reality in my locality is very different. So it is the onus of proving that we are at the receiving end of violence most of the time. And Muslim ghettos are one of the most impoverished sections of most cities in India. So it is also to humanise people around me. One of the things that polarisation does is it reduces people to their immediate identities. So the image of a Muslim is just that. They’re either reduced to loyal sidekicks in movies or either as villains. To narrate how complicated and how rich are the stories of people coming from the marginalised communities, including Muslims. So just to humanise myself, my family and the people of my neighbourhood was the intention.
Q. In your book, you refer to the Partition? Don’t you think that we should remember the past but it’s impacting us a little negatively in the present?
A. I do think Partition is a collective trauma of our society. And I’m not just talking about Muslims, I’m talking about everybody, Hindus and Muslims, anybody who has lived in India. So it not only divided the country, it divided us on religious lines as well. I do think that as a society, we have not recovered from that collective trauma. As a society, India is a very conformist society. The first instinct of any family is to bury the problem instead of facing it, trying to solve it. The first instinct of a society is to not have this conversation because it is uncomfortable. I do think India as a society has to have a lot of uncomfortable conversations. If you ignore history, history will repeat itself. So we have to be sensitive and considerate about how we deal with the memories of the Partition.
Q. You talk about the hatred and being caught in riots, and yet you end on a fairly positive note by talking about hope.
A. There is no other alternative than hope, I guess. Despair is the domain of the privileged because people who are the weakest, who are at the grassroots and who are the most marginalised, if we snatch hope away from them, they wouldn’t have anything left. I do believe India at some point will move away from the chains of communalism, division, casteism, patriarchy that keep holding them and we will emerge stronger.
Listen to Part 2 of the interview here:
Zeyad discusses the inherently secular framework of India
Q. In some senses, I almost would like to believe that writing this book was like a superhero act for you.
A. Unless people start telling their own stories, their stories will be told by others. In that, you become a mute subject. There are so many Dalit writers, Muslim writers who have the skill, who have the language to tell their own stories, and I wanted to inspire them. So you can call that my superhero act, I guess.
Q. Did you conduct a lot of interviews, record a lot of oral histories?
A. I did. And thank you for bringing that word oral history, because that was also one of the intentions of writing this book to, just write an oral history of a ghetto as it is. So I went back to victims and families of the people who perished in those riots. And both Hindus and Muslims. And when I tried to talk to them, for most it was also a very cathartic experience. There is so much drama in my Aligarh neighbourhood, I have not encapsulated even one fourth of the drama in my book. Those stories are so beautiful, so wonderful. And I do think people would want to read them.