In Inez Baranay's new novel, three Muslim women meet a Turkish freedom fighter in Gandhi's India

In 1935, Halide Edib, who had fought alongside Mustafa Kemal Ataturk for the emancipation of Turkey from the Ottoman Empire in the 1920s, visited India to deliver a series of lectures. Her host, M.A. Ansari, was a prominent nationalist, follower and physician to M.K. Gandhi, and a progressive Muslim leader.

Edib spent several weeks in Delhi at Ansari’s residence, met the Who’s Who of polite society, as well as students at Jamia, before travelling to over half a dozen other Indian cities. She wrote a memoir of her time in the country, especially her impression of the days she spent with Gandhi, which was included in a volume paying tribute to the latter, after he was assassinated in 1948.

Based on this material, Inez Baranay’s latest novel, Soul Climate, recreates Edib’s experience of India. At once a work of deep research, imagination and deft storytelling, Baranay intersperses her chapters with her critique of Indian history, especially the persistence of communal politics of the 1930s into the present day.

While the factual scaffolding of the novel is based on papers accessed from online and archival sources, the imaginative retelling of Edib’s experiences is built around the lives of three young Muslim women, cousins by relation, who are grappling with personal and political questions in colonial India.

More than a decade away from Independence, Zoya, Aisha and Nuran are in thrall of their beloved Aunty Toy, who had been to jail due to her active role in Gandhi’s pacifist movement. They are educated and refined, brought up with the best values of the East and West.

Aisha and Nuran dazzle their interlocutors at Parisian salons with their gorgeous saris and polished repartee. Zoya, in contrast, is more introverted, entangled in her personal demons and estrangement from her mother. She finds solace in Ramana Maharishi’s ashram “in the south” of India, discovers a meditative calm there that leads her to a path that is strikingly different from Aisha’s desire to be a firebrand lawyer or Nuran’s dream of marriage to Sajjad, the man she loves.

Baranay’s limpid narrative weaves the destinies of these young women with Edib’s visit. The pages are rich with ideas of identity and nationalism, contrasting the paths adopted by Ataturk, who christened himself the father of modern Turkey, and Gandhi, who was crowned their great patriarch by Indians.

Baranay, who is Australian by citizenship, spent several years in India, scoured through books, papers and media reports in libraries and archives, and delved deeply into Edib’s writings, fiction as well as non-fiction, to create a composite portrait of a turbulent era. What gives her novel urgency is her frequent return to the present, connecting its political and social troubles with the legacies of caste and orthodox religiosity lingering from pre-Independence times.

Soul Climate, which borrows its title from Hadib’s description of her feeling for India, is bold in its attempt to mix biography and memoir with fiction, though the coexistence of all three genres isn’t always seamless. At times, Baranay tends to indulge the metafictional aspect overmuch, the lack of punctuations in her writing makes the syntax of her sentences knotty and, towards the end, she gets caught up in summarizing Edib’s memoirs rather than tying up her semi-fictional threads together.

Despite these niggles, the novel opens a fascinating window onto a period of India’s history when old and new cultures were melding to create a uniquely cosmopolitan national character.