Aftermath stories
Aftermath stories
In an appendix to this book, Meena Menon describes her effort to obtain copies of police cases filed against Shiv Sena leader Bal Thackeray under the Right to Information Act. Menon filed her application in 2004, and immediately plunged into a multilateral battle with thepolice, bureaucracy and law to get some answers. They finally began to trickle in—in 2011, seven years later.
It is a small, unvarnished account, but it forms a bleakly ironic coda to the substance of Menon’s book, and the ideas of truth and reconciliation—that dazzling phrase familiar to us from post-apartheid justice in South Africa—which motivate Riots and After in Mumbai.
The result is a work that does more to deconstruct the riots themselves, than to actually build a “20 years later" story. Testimonies from the battlegrounds of those days—chawls that have been charred to ash, slums which have become refugee camps, exurbs turned to Muslim ghettos—make it bleakly clear that, even if the riots have been suppressed in public memory, as disasters have a habit of doing in Mumbai, there is an unseen, unwritten city where they have never stopped happening.
Perhaps this is the most powerful thought with which the book leaves readers. Disappointingly, if Menon’s book succeeds in giving us any larger picture of post-riots Mumbai, it is mostly by accident. Her opening chapters do look at Mumbai’s long history of religious riots, as an attempt to put 1992-93 in some historical context, and to counter the unhelpful fable of a prelapsarian Bombay where identity politics only arrived with the Shiv Sena. But the rest of the book resists any real framework of ideas, choosing to pursue the memories of dozens of interviewees as an end in themselves, not pausing for political context or social history.
Menon’s directness of purpose in reporting the effects of the riots curiously softens focus as far as their cause is concerned. Nine out of 10 victims of a riot will blame politics and the police, and say what we love to hear them say: that there is a conspiracy at work, and that common people just want to live in peace. The fact is that between December 1992 and March 1993, they didn’t, much as they didn’t in Delhi in 1984 or Ahmedabad in 2002. As this history slips away from public narrative, it becomes easier than ever to think that reconciliation is possible without truth.
Riots and After in Mumbai, unlike that other recent work about an untold city story, Beyond the Beautiful Forevers, is not a book of general interest; its audience is the reader who already knows or cares about, say, who Madhukar Sarpotdar is. Its deeper, more literary truths all lie in between its lines, and they are not about truth and reconciliation, but about an unresolved sorrow. “The walls of my own house charge upon me," goes a poem of Namdeo Dhasal’s, quoted in this book’s epigraph. “They want to assassinate me."
supriya.n@livemint.com
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