History, then and now: on Anjum Hasan’s new novel about a teacher in the dock

(Wrote this review for the latest Reader’s Digest)
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Among other things, Anjum Hasan’s elegant and searching new novel History's Angel is a Delhi book. Its protagonist Alif, a history teacher in his forties, lives in the city with his wife Tahi and adolescent son Salim; so do his parents and a few friends and relatives. Delhi in its many iterations – from medieval Shahjahanabad to modern Vasant Kunj – informs Alif’s wanderings, his thoughts, and consequently the narrative. We follow him as he travels from old Delhi (where he lives) to a swanky Nehru Place mall for a meeting with an old acquaintance, and to the Humayun’s Tomb, where he takes his students on a field trip; from visiting an aunt in busy and cluttered Mehrauli to meeting a landlord about renting a flat in gated-community Noida.

One soon realises what an appropriate setting Delhi is for this story. As an old and multi-layered city of ruins, with the ghosts of many pasts and many kingdoms jostling together in it, the capital is a reminder of how pluralistic this country has been. But as Hasan tells us, more than once, this is also a city made “so insistently, so noisily, of now” – full of lessons if you care to look, but ignored by people who are caught up with the chaotic present. (“More real than the histories of a thousand kings is that girl’s precise voice discussing her cooking […] certain her flimsy moment in time is the only one there is.”)

And so it is with history in general too. Alif frets that most people have only a superficial interest in his subject – only to the extent that it can give them convenient narratives and serve their purposes. He worries that the detritus of history is everywhere, with the modern age having created a rift from the past. And he wants to make history surprising, unexpected, non-linear – to show a dynamic India, not a monolith with one destiny (which, though the book doesn’t belabour this point, is what the fantasies of a Hindu Rashtra are geared towards). But Alif can scarcely afford to look away from his own “now”, for as the story opens he is about to get into trouble because of a student who has provoked and insulted him.

If you read the jacket synopsis of History’s Angel, you might think this is a straightforward dramatic narrative with an A-to-Z arc and a clear political position: about a Muslim teacher who, after a nasty exchange, twists a boy’s ear, rendering himself vulnerable since the new school principal has a barely buried prejudice against his community. And yes, this is the anchoring incident of a story that is also set against the background of the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) controversy of 2019-20. But History’s Angel is a subtler, more searching book than can be described in such terms – it is less interested in being “relevant” in a ham-fisted way to the current Indian political situation (where a community is continuously being vilified), more interested in the inner life and circumstances of a specific man. The reader may be primed for an unpleasant confrontation when Alif decides to visit the schoolboy’s father (who has presumably been filling the child’s head with bigoted ideas about Muslims) – instead we end up in an unexpected space where it is possible to see the boy as a victim of circumstance in another sense.

There are other thing happening around Alif, other vignettes that add up to reveal a good deal: a clearly Hindu puja taking place in school not long after the principal cautioned Alif not to bring religion into education; a passage where Alif and Tahi go flat-hunting and mildly uncomfortable banter grows into something passive-aggressive and then outright menacing. And paralleling complicated national histories, there are complicated personal histories too – as in Alif’s friendship with a man named Ganesh, and an incident in their distant past involving a woman named Prerna, who now reappears in Alif’s life. Or the gradual radicalisation of a man named Ahmad, who has worked for Alif’s parents for decades.

History’s Angel is a very interior work, since we are tied to Alif’s consciousness and privy to his thoughts as well as his elaborate, conflicted conversations with others (such as his one friend in the school staffroom, Miss Moloy). This means it isn’t always an easy read – it can feel weighed down in places, which is perhaps understandable since it is about someone who feels oppressed and lost, sometimes even by his own thoughts; Alif spends a lot of time arguing with himself.

And yet, despite this, the book not only casts a quiet spell through its chronicling of Alif’s days and encounters, it also demonstrates how othering can happen in a gradual, insidious rather than dramatic way. And it leaves us with the question of whether any of us – this history’s angel included – can fully understand the workings of history, and how it pertains to us and our lives.