Soul Climate is a gently meandering narrative whose chapters interweave the perspectives of a mature woman—a veteran of public and intellectual life—with those of three younger women on the threshold of professional and personal adulthood. The former is Halide Edib (1883-1964), a Turkish historical figure widely hailed as a nationalist freedom fighter, intellectual and educationist who visited the Indian subcontinent on the invitation of Dr Mukhtar Ahmed Ansari in 1935. Dr Ansari (1880-1936) is the local historical figure, a nationalist freedom fighter, former President of the Indian National Congress, and co-founder of Jamia Millia Islamia University, to whose fictional family Zoya, Nuran, and Aisha belong.
The actual Halide Edib visited Benaras, Delhi, Mumbai (then Bombay), Hyderabad, Lucknow, Lahore, Kolkata (then Calcutta), Peshawar and Aligarh during her visit. She met with leaders such as Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Khan Abdul Gaffar Khan, and many others, and delivered eight lectures at Jamia, apart from talks at other meetings and gatherings. Edib published her observations and experiences of the land and its people, including the nationalist movements for independence, in Inside India in 1937.
Inez Baranay’s novel, a work of history and fiction, draws on Halide’s memoir to juxtapose the perspectives of different women in order to explore the idea of India as it is being imagined and expounded upon. On the one hand is Halide Edib, whose lines from Inside India are used by the author to periodically punctuate the text and convey Halide’s impressions in her own words. In fact, the title itself borrows from Halide’s description of her feelings for India. On the other hand are the three girls: Zoya, making her way from doodling to creating ‘national’ art, Nuran, scholarly and contemplating marriage, and Aisha, who sees herself as a ‘modern’ woman aiming to become a lawyer. The young women watch, listen, and ponder over the momentous and heady world of nationalist politics, society parties, and intellectual salons they inhabit and the worlds they plan to work towards even as they meet and listen to eminent public figures of the time.
A prominent figure in the narrative is the absent-yet-present Auntie Toy—an aunt who brought each one of them a toy as a child and therefore forever earned the moniker—who had been arrested by the British, allegedly for sedition, and just been released from jail at the beginning of the novel. The girls hero-worship their charkha-spinning Gandhian Auntie Toy but must wait patiently to meet her until towards the end of the narrative as she is convalescing from the effects of her incarceration. There are others—historical women such as Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, Sarojini Naidu, as well as more fictional women from Dr Ansari’s family—who populate the novel but mostly serve as a foil to the three young women poised on the brink of the democratic, secular promises of their times.
There is a third node, apart from Halide Edib and the three girls, that triangulates the narrative: Baranay herself. For the novel Soul Climate is punctuated with chapters that the author uses to address the reader directly, ruminating on history, fiction and more. In one chapter, Baranay brings in discrimination in her country of citizenship, a modern nation that began as a British prison on stolen land. There is an aside on the Australian Dictation Test, a discriminatory immigration tool used from 1901 to 1958 under the White Australia Policy. In another chapter, Baranay documents her search for Dr Ansari’s house. It was a house about which Halide Edib had confidently written: ‘In the free India of the future, that house will be one of the principal landmarks in its making.’ Baranay writes of her dismay at both being unable to find the building and the fact that no one in the locality appeared to know of its existence. Her disappointment is offset, nonetheless, by the pleasure of accidentally accessing photographs taken from the inside of Dr Ansari’s house—‘material reality’—at the Premchand Archives of the library at Jamia Millia Islamia University. In sections such as these, Baranay conveys the despair and the delight of a writer invested in the past and the present, noting that ‘competing narratives’ are a part of the ‘absurdity of the threat of history’ which persuade her that history must be ‘consulted’ and not merely ‘invoked’.
Baranay regards history as configured through the lens of an ‘ever-changing present that seeks to understand the past’. It is therefore curious that her extensive readings around Halide Edib—helpfully shared in a list at the end of the book—did not allow her to explore other accounts around Halide. There has been, for example, research in recent years on the genocide of Ottoman Armenians and Kurds in the early decades of the twentieth century that has examined the role and involvement of Halide, then working as an Inspector General of religious schools. Testimonials from survivors on the Turkification enforced on Armenian children, particularly with reference to an orphanage in the town of Antoura (in modern-day Lebanon) that came under an administrative district within the Ottoman system, have led to critiques of Edib. Scholarship has drawn parallels to a similar assimilation of indigenous children in North America through networks of residential and boarding schools under systematic, government-sponsored policies.
The novel may have become wonderfully more complicated if the occasion of Halide Edib’s visit had also become an opportunity to explore the granularity of our collective and individual filters, all-too-human fallibilities governed sometimes by one’s own time and space. But Baranay chooses to stay strictly within the narrative in Halide’s memoir (written after the above incidents are said to have taken place) and the author’s own fictional account of the happenings from that memoir: the focus stays on the Indian subcontinent. Soul Climate is rich in details that evoke the geographies that Halide travelled through—including an orphanage where children are taught and eat in separate groups according to their ‘communities’—and its discussions on nationalism, patriotism, identity, and freedom nonetheless offer a reader much to ponder over.
Asma Rasheed teaches at The English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad.