While my novel will survive this onslaught (glorious endorsements, remember?), what shocks me is the type of critical analysis the piece is emblematic of–it felt like a personal attack rather than a rational debunking of the novel’s premise, its characters, etc.
Though short, her observations are penetrating and, at the same time, insightful. A case in point is an entry from 3 January 1947, in which she describes her visit (along with Gandhi and others) to a Harijan locality, named Namasudra. She describes this visit thus: ‘In the forenoon we went to visit the Harijan locality—they are called Namasudra—here. The inhumanity perpetrated on them makes one quiver’ (emphasis mine).
The memoir is spread in five sections, namely ‘Fire’, ‘Threads’, ‘Flowers’, ‘Air’ and ‘Water’, which are indicative of violence’s contamination of the most basic elements of the everyday. The section titled ‘Fire’ tells us about her association with fire in the train burning, and the burning of the Gulbarg society, which saw the killing of Ahsan Jafri and Bilkis Bano’s gang rape. The chapter discusses violence that is personalized through its effect on the hearing body and writing body, in this case, the narrator, and her attempts to formalize an affective intimate public sphere to form an affective community. She writes, ‘When I hear the story of the night Bano spent in the forest, I will think often about Bano’s body
Despite securing prestigious opportunities to study abroad, Heredia was confronted with personal sacrifice, as he was unable to attend his father’s funeral while in Chicago. He pays tribute to the influential Jesuits who shaped his journey, including Fr. Joseph Neuner, Fr.
George Soares, Fr. Jose Ugarte and Fr.
The memoir is set out in eight parts and begins with life on the family’s remote island home on Katakhali. A lack of infrastructure—safe drinking water, electricity, sanitation, roads, schools, housing, etc.—compounded by natural calamities made life hard for the people living here. Moreover, accessing basic amenities such as education beyond primary school or even medical assistance required crossing the turbulent Agunmukha which regularly claimed lives.
The Loharu family as ‘the Habsburgs of north India’, whose network of alliances enabled them to be successful in their quest for social, cultural and political advancement is described in chapter five. This first part of the chapter provides details of the matrimonial alliances forged between the Loharu family and other Muslim princes in different corners of India.