POET KEKI N Daruwalla begins his second novel, Ancestral Affairs, in 1947 with lawyer Saam Bharucha, a Parsi, travelling to British protectorate Junagadh as a legal adviser to the nawab to help him make up his mind whether to accede to India or Pakistan. Bharucha has travelled alone, as his wife Zarine was “too nervous about the place” and, in typical tongue-firmly-in-cheek style, Daruwalla makes Bharucha explain just why she is nervous: “The only city in the Parsee imagination was that hyphenated conglomeration of seven islands that lay between Mahim creek, with its feral stink, and Colaba with its smell of dry fish.” Junagadh is a small Muslim state amid many Hindu principalities and, very soon, Bharucha realises he faces an uphill task.
A fellow Parsi and tutor to the prince explains the workings of the palace to Bharucha. The ‘rotund’ nawab of Junagadh, Mahabat Khanji, rarely leaves the palace, has five wives and “keeps to himself and his servants and a few officers”. Though there’s not “much sleaze around”, there’s “only apathy, palpable apathy”. Bharucha meets the nawab, but finds out that he can’t get through to him because of his many advisers, so he spends his time with the locals and gives us a delicious peep into the times.
When Bharucha takes a closer look at the newspapers, we get to know that Mahatma Gandhi has started his walking tour of Noakhali; he sees Aung San in his great coat and baggy pants, and Jawaharlal Nehru in sherwanis and churidars. Historic figures troop in and out of the book amid passionate love stories of a father and son, the backdrop of Partition taking it beyond the sweep of a family saga.
Father Bharucha falls in love with Englishwoman Claire Barnes—whose husband Syd is rather quickly killed off—even as his wife Zarine, in the throes of a spiritual quest, lives on in Bombay and son Rohinton tries to adjust to a boarding school at Lawrence College, Murree, called Gora Gully because of the sheer number of whites who went there. But as the country plunges into turmoil pre-independence, Rohinton has to flee to Bombay before turning up in Kanpur as a medical student and meeting his love Feroza.
Bharucha calls up his wife when he reads about British plans to divide India. “We’ll be two countries and the process of halving, it will need many knives. Imagine the screaming pain as tendon and cartilage and flesh will be severed.” Some of that pain is still being felt. When the nawab of Junagadh initially decides to accede to Pakistan, Bharucha protests against this “personal decision”. Junagadh, of course, stayed with India—and the nawab, begums and all fled. Then, a day after Gandhi is shot, Claire books her ticket for Blighty. “There’s going to be utter chaos. The country may crack up or not, but I certainly don’t want to get caught in the maelstrom. I am leaving. You’ll come, won’t you?” Bharucha and Claire will meet up years later with a promise of a future together.
Daruwalla also weaves in a host of other characters from aunts to grannies, who give us a glimpse of the country from Bombay to Kanpur, Junagadh to Calcutta. Son Rohinton, in search of a job, lands up in Calcutta and is soon invited to an adda, where “the subjects ranged from Alan Davidson to the decline of Mohun Bagan to dancing girls and (in whispers) even whores—except that a Bengali whisper uttered in Chowringhee can be heard in Tollygunge.”
In his acknowledgements, Daruwalla thanks his childhood memories—“I will firstly thank my childhood for the four years I spent in Junagadh from 1945 to 1948”—before anyone else. This is a story of his forbears, and he does the Partition novel proud by telling us about what a family went through. There are no gory scenes, but we know about the violence, the Hindu-Muslim divide, parochialism, roles of our nationalist leaders, as Bharucha follows the newspapers avidly.
You can’t read this rich, layered pre-Partition story about a small Muslim state without thinking about the present, caught as we are in a fierce storm about what nationalism means to us.
Ancestral Affairs
Keki N Daruwalla
HarperCollins
Pp 242
Rs 499
Sudipta Datta is a freelancer
