The blurb of the novel has detailed the
story thus:
A late-night phone call from his
ex-girlfriend Anasuya forces writer Arjun Kumar to leave his wife and home in
Delhi and travel to the mofussil town of Noma on the Up-Bihar border. The
reason—Anasuya’s husband Rafique Neel, a college professor and theatre director,
has mysteriously disappeared. Soon
after he arrives, Arjun realizes that things are not as they seem: the police
are refusing to register a missing-persons case, and the locals are determined
to turn it into a case of 'love jihad'. And when Arjun begins to gig deeper,
what he finds endangers him, and everyone around him.
Inspired by true events from today’s
India, Legal Fiction: A Novel is a
brilliant existential thriller and a chilling parable of our times.
Amitava Kumar, author of
The Lovers considers Pandey’s novel as
‘an urgent, literary report about how truth goes in our land’. Annie Zaidi takes
it as a 'compelling' and 'devastating' story. Meena Kandasamy treats it as an
‘absorbing snapshot of our time’, a ‘minefield of hate politics, the intricate,
almost invisible fault lines in relationships, and the power of art in imagining
a better society’. Author of Diwali in
Muzaffarnagar Tanuj Solanki stresses that Pandey’s novel is a 'cold, dark,
tale', and is written 'in the form of a thriller, a sharp look at a 'terrifying
Indian-ism and the currents against
it'.
No
authors, however, have said that Legal
Fiction: A Novel is a literary investigation of one of India's 'horrendous’
crimes, mob lynching. Although the story has not reported any mob lynching
incident, the fear of being kidnapped, arrested, beaten, or even lynched has
gripped every Muslim citizen. It is not the story of love-jihad, of Rafique’s
missing, or his alleged love affair with one of his students Janaki who is also
missing. It is a tale of lynching.
Why is Niyaz, a college-going boy who
runs Suhag Studio, attacked by the mob of the Mangal Morcha? Niyaz told us,
‘There were two other boys with me in that group, both my classmates in BSc
final year. But all they wanted was a Muslim’ (p. 149).
Rafique is kidnapped because he is a 'brilliant artist and a talented
author', who is going to stage a play
Bachane Wala Hai Bhagwan!, The One Who Saves Is God! The play is based on
the mob attacks on Niyaz who is saved from being lynched by an assistant
sub-inspector Amandeep Singh and who is suspended for his noble job. But he was
officially suspended ‘on the charge that he had been misappropriating funds for
eight years' (p. 146).
Niyaz recalled the day of the attack, 'I
remembered the look on Amit’s face as he hit me. There was a look of calm,
rather than fury. Amandeep Sahib was sent by Allah to save me. Nobody would have
found my corpse had he not been there' (p. 151). From Niyaz we also come to know
about the attack on Anuradha. ‘Before Amit could hit me a second time, Anuradha
came between us and shielded me, the way a roof protects a house’…Anuradha’s
life is hanging by a thread at a hospital in Mumbai’ (p.152).
Rafique
and his theatre group 'thought that if they publicized the instances when people
saved the lives of others, people would then stop playing with others’ lives, or
if needed, would even save them’ (p.151). The veteran and respected journalist
Ravish Kumar in his book, The Free Voice
(2019) opined, ‘It isn’t easy to speak out against Power. Before you speak,
you will have to choose between jail and amputation. Or a lynching’ (p. 47).
Rafique and his students are trying to stage a street play on mob lynching. It
is indeed a revolutionary act. It needs immense courage and sacrifice. The
political authority of the town of Noma does not allow them to perform the play.
That is why the teacher Rafique and his students, Janaki, Jagdish, Kushalpal are
one by one reported 'missing'. They are being kidnapped so the play on the day
of Dol Mela cannot be staged. The love-jihad story is fabricated to throttle a
free, sane and rational voice, a voice that can defy the power.
Legal Fiction: A Novel exposes a holy alliance
among the unholy, powerful men of the town of Noma. The daroga Shalabh Shrinet,
the petty police officers one of whom ‘shoved the lathi against Anasuya’s
stomach’ during her visit for registering an FIR for her husband’s missing, the
single authority of the town Surendra Pratap Malviya-ji, adorably known to Noma
residents as Dadda, the pride of the town who retired as a gazette officer, a
chemical products scientists, and now running BL(D)U—Baba Lakarnath (Deemed)
University which spread over forty acres and looked like the headquarters of
some large corporation, his son Amit Malviya who is the chief attacker of Niyaz,
Amit’s hired goons who take shelter under the political party Mangal Morcha,
Pramod Gupta who ran Navbharat Medical Store and was the local correspondent for
the Dainik Jagrit, and whose
signboards announced his interest in medicine, journalism and human rights, —all
with the help of money, muscle and political power has turned Noma into ‘a
jungle’ which did not have ‘any respect for the rule of law’ (p.136). The town
is sterile as a barren land. The denizens did believe in ‘the web of lies that
had been spun around his life [Rafique]. His diary, his notes, his script—all of
them were telling the truth, but what was available to everyone was the
newspapers, the police, the Morcha, and their homicidal ambitions’ (p.153).
These educated, sophisticated, powerful wealthy people were 'in love with
themselves. They had several achievements to boast of, but all of them looked
restless' (p.69). They mocked
Rafique, ‘Such a big author is in our city and nobody knows about it?’ (52) The
city's literary circle is trash. No writers of the town have the guts to
appreciate the lover of Mayakovsky or Muktibodh’s poetry or Premchand’s stories.
These big names of the town were ever
vigilant of their town’s reputation. They accused the narrator that his Facebook
post had tarnished the town's image and that he had come to Noma to meet his
ex-girlfriend Anasuya. Against this charge Arjun Kumar burst:
I haven’t come here to
find Rafique. He is not a lost tune or a memory that needs to be
found. He is a living, breathing person, his wife is pregnant, and—now listen to
this carefully—not a single person, not one person from this garbage town must
have come forward to help her. That’s why she thought of me’ (p.77).
According to
the 2021 Freedom to Write report published by a non-governmental organization
Pen America which works to protect freedom of expression across the world, 277
writers and academics were detained or in prison in 36 countries last year. Of
them, eight are from India – comedian Munawar Faruqui and Bhima Koregaon accused
persons Varavara Rao, Sudha Bharadwaj, Vernon Gonsalves, Hany Babu, Gautam
Navlakha, Arun Ferreira and Anand Teltumbde. Aman Abhishek , a noted columnist,
claims since assuming power in 2014, Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has
been systematically destroying the secular, democratic foundations of India and
transforming the country into a strictly Hindu nation. BJP’s Hindu supremacist
ideology portrays Muslims as the nefarious ‘other’. Moreover, Hindu supremacy is
about the hegemony of upper-caste Hindus. Lower castes, which constitute the
majority of the Indian population, are, on one hand, told to be proud Hindus,
and on the other hand, oppressed violently because the caste system deems them
inferior. It is in this context that anti-caste, Dalit scholars such as
Teltumbde, as well as Muslim and other dissident academics, are accused of being
‘anti-national’ and prosecuted with fabricated charges.
Rafique is kidnapped apparently for his
love jihad activities. But behind his ‘missing’, his role as an artist to stage
a play that has the power to disturb the authority of the town is crucial. If
Rafique has been a 'genteel' teacher, whose activities will be limited to
reading only 'prescribed' books, taking notes from them, and disseminating those
notes among his students, he will not be a threat to the town's image. Even if
he is ready to stage the play,
Chandragupta, as suggested by Dadda, will be praised for his art.
But Rafique is a creative artist. He writes scripts for public
performances to call attention to incidents of mob lynching.
Pandey’s fiction needs to be read in the
context of the rising attacks on intellectuals, poets, writers, and activists
across the country. It also needs to be read against the backdrop of rising
incidents of mob lynching. It needs to be read against the background of hate
crimes against the Muslims and Dalits of contemporary India. Trading cows,
eating beef, wearing a skull cap or burqa or niqab, falling in love with a girl
or boy of another community, and the likes are merely excuses for the Hindutva
mobs to beat or lynch them. There is absolutely no space for a Muslim artist
like Rafique. His survival demands his denial of any creative pursuits.
I am a bit uncomfortable with the flow of
Tiwari’s prose. The cover of the book is not catchy. But the story is superb. It
deserves a wide readership.
Title: Legal Fiction: A Novel
Author: Chandan Pandey
Avaialble:
Amazon