M.G. Vassanji traces the rise and fall of kingdoms in his new novel 'The Apparition'

Amir Hassan al-Shirazi, the narrator-protagonist is a Sufi poet, historian and intellectual who the Sultan himself has tasked with chronicling the history of his regime. In one scene, Hassan’s friend Nazar Ben Hakim, a dealer in rare books, manuscripts and antiquities, is arrested by Khilji’s clerics on suspicion of being a Baatini—a word used to describe Muslim groups that differentiate between an outer (zaahir) and an inner (baatin) meaning of Islamic scriptures. Vassanji, 76, was born in Kenya to Indian immigrant parents from one such community, the Khoja Ismailis.

The Apparition is divided into three sections and, to emphasise its theatrical structure, there is an exhaustive list of characters for each section at the beginning of the book. The first section ends with the fall of the Khilji regime, thanks to the arrival of “the Avians”, a hyper-intelligent and resourceful race of half-human, half-bird hybrids who conquer Delhi with minimal bloodshed. The second and third sections are about the Avians themselves; their covert agendas and the challenges they face while setting up their colonial rule. Soon, Delhi becomes a culture in flux as the Avians’ influence permeates everyday life.

For example, a growing cohort of young Muslim women called the “Newbirds” stops observing purdah, ditching their veils for flamboyant make-up modelled after female Avians. Many men are upset at first and some even assault these women, but the Avians crush them quickly and ruthlessly. Soon, the Newbirds become a fact of life in Delhi. The point here isn’t to elevate one way of life as superior to another. It’s to depict the ground-level push-and-pull involved with any societal reform.

“I wanted to show how an entire population reacts to change at that scale,” Vassanji says during an interview in Delhi. “Most ordinary people have some taboo behaviours that they frown upon. But they’re still regular folks, they’re not crazy and they adapt with the times. The real fanatics, the ones who refuse change no matter what, are a small slice of the population. You can observe this everywhere across eras. If you visited the South Asian diaspora in Toronto 25 years ago, for example, you would never see the kind of gay and lesbian representation that you do today. Delhi culture also changed with the Sultanate—people (especially the elite) started speaking Persian and Turkish, and so on.”

Amidst this upheaval, Hassan finds solace with his fellow Sufis, especially his master Sheikh Sadruddin, who is written as the epitome of liberal, inclusive Islam. When he is twirling in circles with them, Hassan is peaceful and content, lost in a religious reverie. Sadruddin’s faith gives him and his followers a palpable lightness of spirit and he is notably the only character in pre-Avian Delhi who is unafraid of Sultan Khilji. Despite repeated requests, Sadruddin refuses to meet with Khilji and instructs his followers to do the same.

“The character of Sheikh Sadruddin was inspired by Nizamuddin Auliya,” says Vassanji. “He refused to go to Alauddin Khilji’s court because he did not see the point. The Sufis could not submit to a human authority because they were worshipping a higher power and seeking a god within themselves. So why bother with the Sultan? I think this idea feels quaint to us today because we are cynical and besides, we are all terrified of our governments.”

The meticulous characterisation of the Avians (plus their detailed lore) is one of the biggest strengths of the novel, showing us the blow-by-blow mechanics of how kingdoms rise and fall. In a lot of Islamic art, architecture and calligraphy, birds are viewed as intermediaries between earth and heaven. We see the Avians installing a wise hoopoe-woman as the new ruler of Delhi. This is evocative of a tale from the Quran, where a hoopoe acts as intermediary between Queen Sheba and King Solomon (a character associated with preternatural wisdom).

How stories and legends migrate across cultures and inform each other, therefore, is also a recurring theme. The Avians have a version of Christ’s crucifixion story, only, in this version, “Yoshua” flies away from the crucifix at the end.

In-between worlds

The Baatinis, hunted for their unconventional beliefs, are a kind of moral and theological weather-vane for The Apparition. Even a super-tolerant man like Hassan can’t help but feel a measure of anxiety and fear about their existence. In a darkly funny scene, we are shown how orthodox Hindus and orthodox Muslims are united in their horror of Baatini traditions of worship, which explicitly incorporate Hindu, Muslim and Christian figures and themes (modern-day Ismailis continue this tradition, incorporating Hindu bhajan-kirtans within their worship).

“Ismailis have been persecuted... in Pakistan and elsewhere largely due to ignorance and insecurity,” Vassanji says. “Because of that persecution, they’re trying to change in a reactionary way. Some people within our community are trying to erase parts of our belief system—what I’d call Indian culture, the culture I grew up with. So if there’s a bhajan that Ismailis are singing, and it has the words “harihar swami”, they will get very nervous.” In his essay Nowhere with God: Uneasy Confessions of a Syncretist (part of the 2024 essay collection, Nowhere, Exactly), Vassanji had written about his upbringing in the Khoja Ismaili community and argued that a turn towards religious rigidity would end up narrowing our imagination, making us parochial and small-minded.

For a reader discovering Vassanji in 2026, I imagine many of his previous novels read like extended prophetic warnings, especially The In-Between World of Vikram Lall (2003) and the criminally underrated Amriika (1999). The inimitable Vikram Lall belongs to a Kenyan family of Indian origin—his father works for the British. Vikram meanwhile becomes close friends with a pair of British siblings living next-door, even as his sister falls for his Kenyan friend. He is well and truly “in-between”, caught in a crossfire between several cultures. As chest-thumping nationalism is on the rise globally, Vikram’s account feels like a cautionary tale, the story of a man who pays a heavy price for being loyal to people, not flags.

“I have this friend from Zanzibar whose family is Indian. He was a part of the Zanzibar Revolution,” Vassanji says. “But after the socialist government replaced the royals, he found himself discriminated against because of his Indian heritage. Even then, the bitterness he felt was against the government, not the land he grew up in. Vikram Lall is very similar.”